Friday, May 1, 2009

Akele ho???

XYZ: "So..went grocery shopping ?"

Arpita: "Yeah..."

XYZ: "Akele..akele??? Why living alone? Arre Boyfriend bana lo..phir woh sab kuch uthayega." (Why living alone? Get a boyfriend..then he would carry everything for you)

Arpita: "Not living alone. Just chose to live independently. And I like it that way."

XYZ: "Achcha..OK..OK."

Certain things in life insult your intelligence, for instance, the aforementioned piece of conversation!! Although you laugh at XYZ later (Saala..Frusti...Looser kahin ka!!) and chuckle at the thought (Yeah..yeah I know I’m single and that too a dish! Hahahahaahha)

“Man is a social animal”. I remember writing an essay on it when I was in 5th standard. Not that I deny it today. But trust me, it doesn’t hurt that much to be alone, either.

Okiee..to be candid, for someone like me who never ever lived in a hostel, coming back to an empty room was tough initially!! But now it’s my haven. As soon as I come through the door I put on some good music, get myself a cup of chai and thereafter I can be as self-interested as I please.

I mean living alone is not a smooth journey. You definitely win some and loose some.

Hmm..alright..lets think about it!

To weigh the pros:

Your house just remains the way you left it. You make mess, you do the cleaning. Simple.

There are no scruffy towels and toothpaste smears in the bathroom.

No one to grouch if you are an insomniac and leave the bedside light on to read until four in the morning, munching biscuits in bed.

You can rely on horrible salads/ MTR ready to-eat meals, savour every morsel of milk-bread and in worst case scenario eat aloo bhujia directly from containers, without taking a guilt trip of not cooking for the other person (There’s a hell of a well guarded excuse: “What's the point cooking, when it's only me?”)

You can cuss without a fuss and sing out aloud!

How much ever lousy you may look but you can still hang around in those horrendous pair of pink pyjamas and stringy hair!

You can go on a loooooooooong walk for as long as you want (I have already roamed around half of Ulm on foot!! )

You are responsible for your own time keeping and duties. You are your own wall calendar and desk planner yourself.

And not to forget, you also learn some well aimed, key self-defense moves that might scare the living crap out of roadside goons.

So in principle you have autonomy. (Which eventually doesn’t seem so strange to you)

In argument of the cons:

It’s plausibly easy to buy too much food. So you have to keep reminding yourself that you are the only one who is going to eat. (Else fungus and bacteria have a feast lined up)

Living alone can lead to some pretty awful food experiences. You think you are in control and you experiment but later you feed it to the dogs.

It’s a one person household. So you practically run for home, groceries, cooking, laundry, trash, finances. And when you invariably get back home from work at 10 pm, sometimes it does gets difficult(Damn! Everything closes down at 8 p.m. in Germany!)

There are days when your professional/ personal/ emotional/ physical life is an all time dipping low and you got to act brave and face it all by yourself..(But then you learn to convince yourself that “It’s going to be one of those days….I will get over it” :))

You are branded an “Ice queen”. A lonely and bitter recluse who can’t love and co-habit and hence denies relationship with the human race. ( You gotta laugh this out too, for it takes far more courage to understand and self-accept yourself first before sharing your life with someone else!!!)

In a nutshell, living alone might be untraditional, but is definitely cheaper than hiring someone to put you out of your misery. You needn’t be in a relationship to be happy or feel good about yourself! Cinderella could have been happy too even if she had never met her Prince Charming..just that she never thought that ways!

I highly recommend to one and all. Live alone. Once.

Day after day...Page after page....you will realise that even if one piece of the story is missing, others still make sense.

You step out of your skin and metamorphose into someone, who for better or worse is more comfortable with oneself!

It’s a learning experience, even if you learn the lessons the hard way, which sometimes is the best or the only way.

2 comments:

zigzagtrail said...

Why living alone :P

Arpita said...

@Praveen
Not again!!!
*Arpita's head meets desk*