WHEN QUOTES WERE BEAUTIFUL GIFTS

It was an evening in September 1993 and I had just returned home from Bangalore after a work assignment. It had been just a few months since I got married and there were still a few well wishers and relatives who could not make it for the marriage visiting us to wish us a good life as we took the road ahead. As I entered my room, I saw a quotation, beautifully framed and hanging on the wall opposite to the window. “Ours maths teacher was here yesterday and he gifted this. He was sad that he could not meet you”, said my wife. I was still looking at it really absorbed in the intensity of the words while she continued, “It will be good if we could meet him at school sometime”. Both I and my wife were students from the same school, she being just a year junior to me. The quote read “A strong marriage requires two people who choose to love each other, even on those days when they struggle to like each other” – Dave Willis. 

From that day, every time I went into my room, my eyes encountered these words.  When marriage took me through a range of emotions, these words hit me with varying intensities and found their way into my intense thinking, creating ripples of different dimensions. With the break of dawn, through noon, leading through to twilight and then into the night, I saw these words in varying shades of light and varying moods of mine. Each time I read, I felt them sinking into me deeper. It has been years now and still these words prove to be the foundation on which our marriage is riding the waves in an ocean, sometimes like a royal ship and sometimes like a flotsam sans directions. But the ride is still on. There are several corollaries that I draw from these lines and each has a different interpretation depending on the situation.

In 1994, I gifted my mother-in law, a framed quotation that read “A mother understands what a child does not say” – Jewish Proverb. That wall hang is still there adorning the wall at her home. A quote as a gift was considered respectable and many in those times gifted these for marriages and other important days. In the years between 1977, when I had grown enough to understand such quotes, till the late 90s when the internet started slowly weaving its labyrinth, I had just seen a handful of quotations including the wall hangs that my eyes had spotted in other homes. A few of these had an impact on me and had got written into my mind permanently. Of course, we did read the Bible everyday and most of the verses there, were to be memorized as part of the Sunday School exercises and competitions. But this way, we encountered each verse probably only once or twice a year when competitions came in. I am not including them in the scope of this list although some homes had wall hangings that displayed Biblical quotes too.

We have traveled forward through another twenty years and we have seen the internet invasion and the mobile invasion. Every day quotations find their way into my phone and my mail box, like a swarm of bees. By the time I read and assimilate one, the next one is here banging on the doors of my mind. Liking a quote on WhatsApp is the fastest disposal method most of us adopt. It satisfies the sender and also gives us the relief to go ahead and remove it from our device. But as a result, these don’t sink into our mind sufficiently for implementation. Some really fantastic words come and go and I wish I read these over and over and slept with them to make them a part of my life. But before I hug them, another bunch is knocking my doors to let them in. We no more gift quotations to our dear ones or friends as these quotations are now all around us like the air we breathe and have become very ordinary entities. We have been flooded with quotations that we almost gasp for a breath of fresh air.

May be, we should take a few and hang it on our walls again. May be it's just fine to browse through just a handful of quotations and go really deep into them so as to implement them, rather than taking in a truck full and sending them into the drain with no action.

You can find my short story book 'A PEARL FROM EVERY OYSTER' at:

https://notionpress.com/read/a-pearl-from-every-oyster

https://www.amazon.in/Pearl-Every-Oyster-Stories-Shorter/dp/1948473151/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GI23X9JIKQGK&keywords=a+pearl+from+every+oyster&qid=1583428674&sprefix=A+Pearl+from%2Caps%2C302&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Every-Oyster-Stories-Shorter-ebook/dp/B07948GRVC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1H9GU3Q8JNH29&keywords=a+pearl+from+every+oyster&qid=1583428722&sprefix=a+pearl+from+ev%2Caps%2C363&sr=8-1


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