Society: Paralyzing generations, from generations

Sometimes while sleeping you must have felt a great pressure on your chest. It feels like someone is sitting on your chest and pushing you down. You are partially awake, can’t speak and can’t even move. This phenomenon is called sleep paralysis in scientific terms. During sleep paralysis you feel powerless, afraid to your guts and to the worse you feel helpless because you apply all your strength to push yourself out of your bed but you cannot. To those who have experienced it, sleep paralysis is worse of the worst nightmares. Now imagine a scenario where you are sleep paralytic 24*7. You are well in your senses going through a routine day but you are in a condition where you feel the same fear and pain that you feel in sleep paralysis. They both were facing that pain daily!

Aryan and Tanya were a routine couple. They were deeply in love and they could have never asked for anything more. All the little or more that they had achieved in their lives was well earned. They had worked hard through tough times and had proved their mantel in their own world. They never had any luxury dreams. They believed that happiness and luxury are two different dimensions and they just wanted a normal and decent life full of love.

They almost had it all figured out but just one thing, the great Indian society! Being millennials and living their life in the globalized world they had almost forgotten that they belonged to the same orthodox and hypocritical society which still believes that it is the best in the world. Aryan and Tanya decided to get married and similar to any other Indian adults, this decision was not theirs afterall.  The same old Indian family story repeated itself where at first the girls’ parents wouldn’t approve of the wedding and by the time they do the boy’s parents would also have flipped sides. Aryan and Tanya also had fallen into the same loop. The reasons for the disapproval varied from time to time, starting from caste and then to society and then finally getting blocked on the famous astro-match point.

Now the point here is not to share the same old story but to take a step back and think of the sleep paralysis that the society is giving to its own children. From the society’s perspective, Aryan and Tanya are being selfish and they only have one thing to take care of which is being married. But from Aryan’s and Tanya’s perspective is this only thing that they need to worry about? No. They both are in their twenties wherein they are trying to focus on building up their lives. They have to build up careers; they have to earn the basic needs of theirs which includes their livelihood, house and car etc. They have one thing sorted out which is love. But the society decides that this love relationship is not good for both of them in the longer run and they should part ways.  One could just imagine the amount of burden that this would have brought to lives of both of them. How could they focus on other important things when the most important thing in their life is in jeopardy? And not to mention he impact that would be on their personalities and their lives. The so called self-proclaimed and self-idealistic beliefs of our society have turned out to be such oppression on the silly lives of Aryan and Tanya. What could be worse to having felt sleep paralysis even when you are awake? This is like you are living a paralytic life. You can do everything but not that one thing that you want to do the most.

What the society does not understand is that life is NOT a set of disintegrated blocks wherein you can pull any block any time if you don’t like it. What the society needs to understand is that life is a STACK of blocks. If you take out one block from the middle, the whole stack falls. Love is a building block in one’s life. If you pull it off, whole life falls apart. Now if love is removed from Aryan’s and Tanya’s life their focus from all other things will automatically shift and the results will be cataclysmic. So basically in the quest for the greater good, their own people would lead Aryan and Tanya into a life of failure and darkness.

The fate of many such Aryan and Tanya dangles in the dingles of the society. The discussion is endless and the conclusion is not even near but I wish that our society would have the strength to accept what is actually good for the future then to be over protective and judgmental. Our society needs to understand that the ideas that they cherish are gone with the passing days and they need to evolve. Then only there could be a true society that does not holds its future that is not bonded to crutches of the past. Then only the society can awake from this paralysis. 

-by Ambuj