Ex-(ample) !

Character, like a photograph, develops in darkness.
With these words the legendary Yousuf Karsh outlined a strange paradox - the equal importance of shadows and highlights in adding depth and dimension. Too much of one and you are at a risk of becoming too dark or too bland. We need the perfect balance. It’s this magic ratio that bewilders us with choices.
Life is all about choices. Having them, choosing them, living them or leaving them. Some choices like- whom to marry are big, while some like propensity for Calvin and Hobbes or Archies are even bigger. But comic-books or cuisines- the arbitrary constant that remains is the omnipresence of the fourth dimension- time. After a point of time, our present choices are condemned to the past and left to rot in the junkyard of retrospection. And we, their once doting owners, disown them, derogatorily labeling them as our ex-s.
Off late I have been encountering a lot of ex-s- of my friends and my own. Lemme start with my blasts from the past. Things you do and choices you make have a strange property of reappearing more frequently when they go sour. Take my choice of Vodka for instance. The virgin alcoholic started with White Mischief, graduated to Fuel and finally attained nirvana with Smirnoff. But in doing so, he condemned his pocket to some serious pinch and attracted the ire of lesser drinkers! He became the snob who snubbed the White. My second brush with an ex came in the form of an ex- gf (Girl friend for the lack of a better verbal substitute. We are still confused about what to call our old feelings- lost in the twilight of infatuation and attraction.) We got back in touch, smoothed out some old problems, created new ones and revived our amazing professional rapport. In short we became friends, or did we?
Algebra teaches us to consider X as the unknown. A + B = X. Friendship plus commitment equals love. Ok there are lotta defunct versions of that equation and none close to solving the riddle. But what none seem to care about is the possibility of friendship with an ex. While some like me live in the utopia of its possibility, others like my friends G and Max aint so sure. Is it possible that I, by virtue of my three ‘serious’ encounters, am better qualified to comment about it than my friends who work with the serious limitation of just one element in the sample space ? Or is it this single minded surgical focus that separates them from this carpet bombing Romeo? When push comes to shove and it’s time to move on, we deal with our past in different ways. How we do that is up to us- again a matter of choice. So I continue to be her blues manager and she continues to inspire me with her talent. But down the line we both know how incredibly similar we are….. and the thought of spending our lives with someone as imperfect as ourselves scares us. So we play Goldilocks and continue with our search, for the elusive ‘perfect' one.

Photograph : Your Truly