"Kaira, have you ever bought a chair?"
"Kaira, have you ever bought a chair?"
"A chair, kursi, have you ever bought one? (Yes!) And did you just go into the shop and buy the first chair you saw? (No.) Exactly my point. We look at so many different chairs until we find the right one. Some chairs may be comfortable but looks like shit; others look nice but are hard on the butt. So the process starts, chair after chair after chair. How many chairs we check out before we find that one chair? (Dr. Khan sits into a chair that creaks when Kaira sits. She warned him, but the chair didn't creak.) It doesn't creak with me. So my point being, if we look for so many options just to buy a chair, then shouldn't we look at options when choosing a life partner?
Dear Zindagi or Dear Life is a coming-of-age film starring Alia Bhatt as Kaira, an aspiring cinematographer and her meeting Dr. Jehangir Khan, played by Shah Rukh Khan, a free-spirited therapist. As much as I want to go deeper with this film, I think a separate review will do it justice only because it is 2nd in my favorite Indian film list after 3 Idiots.
In the story, Kaira was finally opening up to Dr. Jehangir Khan a.k.a Jug, and she shared about how she came to Goa from Mumbai after knowing that the person she likes, and she thought likes her back, is already engaged. But the thing that really bothers her the most is the thought of not going to America because that would mean working alongside with him and his fiancée even though it has always been Kaira's dream to make it big and that opportunity only knocks once in a lifetime.
So Jug asked her about Raghuvendra, the guy she likes who is engaged, and Kaira didn't hesitate to share. And she also did mention Sid, the guy she was dating before she met Raghu. Jug asked her, "So, there's Sid, too?" Kaira didn't take it too well, and got pissed with Jug telling him that he also thinks that she is ugly, cheap, trashy, and dirty which she feels that she is. Jug assured her that he doesn't think of her that way and started sharing the story about looking for that one chair.
The Chair Creaked ― A Love Analogy
I think Kaira is the best representation of someone who doesn't love herself enough. Someone whose got demons to defeat first before finally settling down with someone she doesn't necessarily need but only wants. We often find ourselves overly dependent to someone to make us whole; neglecting the fact that we only need ourselves to be whole in order to share that wholeness to someone else.
Choosing a chair wisely is not about sleeping around, although that might actually happen (minus the word around) when you're in a relationship with someone, but the point of this analogy is picking your life partner wisely. And I remember hearing somewhere that your happiness depends on the person you marry, and that might be true albeit not a 100%. But to those who are planning to get married, spending the rest of your life with the right person means so much to the point that it scares me to marry someone who doesn't even get 80% of who I am.
Now, don't get me started with 'perfect relationship' or 'the one', because everyone creaks from time to time; you just gotta stick until you can no longer bear that annoying squeaking sound.
How about you? Have you had relationships you needed to give up because you can no longer stand the creaking sound? And yes, it shouts #TOXICRELATIONSHIP to me.
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Namaste, Stranger!
