That irritating neighbour

Yeah it’s right as a human, we love few people and there are few individuals we put them in the category of “we like them” and there are few people “we love to hate them” but why? Is there anything in them that simply triggers something inside us? Okay we may say they are simply irritating. Although they may have never hurt you intentionally but any way we still we got annoyed by their mere presence. Their presence is enough to get on our nerves. I am damn sure you must know a person or two who belongs to this category.

There is a woman just next to my home she is in her forties or early fifties right now, she have three kids and a caring husband. From the day she got married and arrived in our neighborhood her network of gossiping started, within a week or so she became “favourite” of every agony aunt. They talked about everything from dressing code of young girls to the behaviour of young boys. Soon she was labeled BBC by teenagers in our area.

Even she started to advice every chap about his future and looked really concerned. Many young brains started ignoring her but she never got the signal. My first encounter with her was blown out of proportion by her. It was monsoon and due to heavy raining one of the main electricity poles of our area was spoiled and the people from TPDDL turned down the supply to mend that problem.

After seven or eight hours inverters gave up but electricity was still a distant dream. It was night and to skip the electricity woes I went out with my friends, but when we returned home street lights were not working. 

Thanks to the awesome parking space everyday is a new battle for every inch of land. As I was parking my car, I accidentally crushed the flower pot that was cleverly installed there as a line of boundary by my great neighbour.

Before I could say anything she started quarrelling I sincerely apologized to her but she was adamant to fight. I even offered to buy her a new flower pot but she was not willing to listen and constantly kept blaming me, within seconds almost everyone in my neighborhood was on road. I pinched myself to make sure whether I accidentally hit the flower pot or a human.

Even my father apologized to her on my behalf but she was still making fuss. After minute or so everyone went back after looking at her stupidity and the scenario. From that day I made sure to be extremely careful and tried every possible way to avoid her.      

 I still remember the time when one of my cousins had to rent a floor in her building because her own apartment was renovating. In eight months flat she lost almost eight kilograms thanks to her because she sucked every ounce of blood in her body because she had the habit of poking her nose in every possible tiny thing.

But life changes and so does our point of view. It happened few years back, I returned from office and noticed the huge gathering outside her home. I got the sad news of her husband’s demise he was still very young. Although from last ten years I have attended many funerals and definitely someone somewhere was connected to me, many times I went there for formality and many times I was genuinely there to share the pain of the close ones. But death of her husband was jolt for me he was jolly and helpful person or in other words he was totally opposite to his wife.

I went there and went to gurudwara as well. After few days of that incident I noticed a drastic change in her. She never talked unnecessary to anyone she was not involved with any kind of bitching with other women of our area. It was total change for her. Now her elder son is looking after the business and she is helping him to settle down in business that his late father started.

Everyone in our neighborhood went to help her in whatever way they can. Now she doesn’t care who park’s car. She is very calm and everyone in the area co-operates with her. Then I realized we are so dumb that unless a calamity teaches us the tough lesson we don’t want to co-operate with others.

It is not about her or me, but that incident made me realize why our older generation lived happily even when they had very few assets. My grandfather and many more people like him suffered the pain of partition. When he reached India in miserable condition he lived in harmony with everyone, then with years of hard work he changed his destiny and built a hugely successful business from scratch.

Then I realized maybe it is the suffering that polishes the real gem in our personalities. That’s why all the people of that era lived happily they adjusted with others and somehow settled their lives again. Maybe the luxurious and secure life what we got from our elders made us so impatient that we are always ready to fight.

Now the road rage is at all time high, and younger generation literally carry revolver along with their i phones. We are well read, we have much more exposure than our fore fathers could have ever imagined but deep down we are still animals.

To call our self human is self praising, maybe the struggle is the only answer to our madness.