Deja Vu

Once in a while we do come across a situation where a total stranger appears like a known person resulting in an instant bond that transcends all norms. Same happened with me during my official tour to Kandla where I met Amit who served me breakfast with a smile on his face. After few rounds of interaction Amit remarked that my face appeared very familiar and that probably he had met me earlier. His observation could have passed on as a standard line for striking a conversation. But strangely I  too felt the same about him and prompted me to ask him whether he had worked/lived in any of the places that I had visited in the past. Strangely neither was he anywhere near my age group nor had he lived or worked in any of the places named by me. It was a strange sense of Deja Vu of having met a person like him in the past. Someone who not only resembled him in physical appearance but also in mannerisms and way of communicating.

The feeling being mutual made us communicate more during my breakfast sessions during the weeklong stay in the hotel and by then he came to know that I was almost twice as old as him and he started looking forward to me for few words of wisdom based on life experiences. On the last day Amit asked me a very poignant question. While I struggled to provide him with a plausible answer, it made me ponder over the weekend over the depth of his question.

Amit wanted to know why a woman finds it so difficult to adjust with her in-laws? He wanted to know what any husband could do for resolving the issue.

On the face of it his question appeared to be no brainer and I began answering him with the standard quote that it's Kahaani Ghar Ghar ki and was an ailment with no cure. But gradually the topic veered towards the aspect of how different women are from men, physically, mentally and emotionally. According to me the biggest reason for marital disputes is the inherent sense of mothering/caring that an average woman is born with. And this continues with her all through her life and manifests in the urge to control the men around her, be it her brother and father during her childhood, her male friends during her adolescence and her husband and her son post marriage. All is well and hunky Dory as long as there is only one woman around a man showering her motherly affection. Problem arises the moment another woman is there in the arena. And it's always the man who is split between his mother and his wife or between his sister and his mother or between his wife and his daughter. Men too add fuel to the fire by unwittingly taking sides resulting in the other woman getting ensnared in a sense of insecurity bringing out her darker shade. Darker shade of a woman invariably results in the man being fed with negativity about the other woman in question, which mostly happens to be either his own mother, his wife or his daughter. It may sound very misogynistic, but very rarely we come across a woman who inspite of being hugely insecure  can handle such situations maturely.

The only word of advice that I could offer Amit was that a man should always try to ensure that the women around him never feel insecure because of his behaviour. According to me, for any man the biggest problem in life is to live with a woman having a sense of insecurity. And unfortunately very few men have been fortunate enough to have mastered this rare art.😊