Relationship

Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

Crowds flow on the roads; crowded buses and trains move along fixed or diverted routes; families, offices and countries functionally move forward from day to day, year to year. Yet we say we are lonely in a crowd. A 19^th century Romantic even said, I am less alone when alone, nature is company enough for me. A modern man or woman has now no time to discover his/her loneliness. We wake up to work and while working fall on the bed. Ask any man or woman to visit your house, the reply would be, I would love to but I have to find time you know! Time is lost to every one; even lovers are often late for the rendezvous. We move fast, invent fast cars, bullet trains, supersonic jets and spacecrafts but do not reach anywhere. All our anxieties, self-imposed tensions do not lead us anywhere. We do not know where to stop. We only take uneasy pauses; the result is we are not related to anything. Our relationships come crashing down. Friendship, marriage, contracts and promises of eternal bond never continue beyond interests. We marry saying we will be faithful to each other till death do us part. But we have no time for each other. The wife is busy in kitty parties, ramp shows, parlours and fashion parades while the husband has no respite from meetings, presentations, promotional trips and business parties. Executives spend more time in hotels than in homes. The middle class mostly suffers from workplace alienation and carries a morose temper home. He speaks, if at all, about his problems without caring for the other members in the family. The poor men and women have only one meaning of relationship , that is sex, that too a compulsive release of tensions in dark sweaty rooms. Politicians behave like individuals. They say openly relationship is not permanent, interests are.

This pursuit of interest is the bane of modern civilization. The Smartphone helps the modern individual to wallow in his personal world. He has no time for his worries. He does not want love, peace, friendship or patriotic commitments towards his country. His only need is success. He must succeed in life whatever be his calling. He can harm the interest of others and can even kill to climb to the top. But he doesn't know that it is lonely at the top.

Today nature is replaced by civilization, morality by law and all horizontal relationships by vaulting ambitions. Democracy guarantees free expressions and scope to ride your dream horses on your own steam. Automatically man becomes a loner because those close to him are also launching their own dream ships to the stars.

He who is alone is either god or a beast, said Aristotle. How true! He meant that God is naturally alone but within the society if somebody is alone (he/ she) is not human. But today Aristotle is an anachronism. Postmodern man is deliberately lonely. He feels that he will right the wrongs of God ,the creator. He will make the world more beautiful, more life- friendly, more organized and more livable. In the process, however, he makes the world hostile and falls a victim to his own heroic forays into God's domain.

The only panacea for loneliness is relatedness. Man must connect. Man must love other human beings. But who knows what love is and who cares!