close encounters....

2 recent encounters stand out...

one , a svelte socialite I know, who was going through a heart break...she was feeling abused....her last date was now an "item" at local parties with her best friend..."how could he do that to me?, she was asking me. But, dont people forever do this, day in and day out? carefully masked , maybe, but is it not almost an omnipresence...do we really know to relate?when people say, "i love you" are they really meaning, "i need you" and "i need you to need me"...i wonder....

could not help contrasting this conversation with another I had a few months back....it was with a commercial sex worker who had called me to help her father out....she was on a ngo connect...i knew that this was her step father and he had been pretty abusive to her....when i asked her about her concern for him after all that she had gone through...she just said, "sometime people have compulsions....my mother likes him....he has been able to give her some happiness...in an otherwise deserted life...how does it matter if i help out.....all of us use each other all the time....sometimes individually and sometimes collectively....some subtly and yet others not so subtly....nafrat sirf humhe andhar kha jaati hai, saab, " so saying she signed off..

there is nothing glamourous...in the way she behaved....just a mechanism she had devised for herself in understanding life....