Its been a while since I have cried at the
movies. After you have been exposed to emotional heavyweights like
"Notebook", "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and my
favorite sinking ship, "Up" (note the irony), I thought it would take
a lot from a movie to get me going for the tissue box. All that changed when I
sat down to watch ROOM. The story is simple - a mother and son, living in
confinement for 5 years, finds a way to escape and then laboriously attempts to
return to their normal lives. But if you really try to understand the movie,
you discover this discomforting and ultimately very rewarding tearjerker,
teaches the true essence of happiness. Happiness isn't what the world defines,
or what society outlines or what popular culture throws in your face - you can
live in a 4x4 room and be perfectly happy. All you need to do is find your
center. In the case of the mother "Maa", it was her son, Jack.
Although she plotted to escape for her son's sake, she was actually perfectly
happy living in that room with Jack, with whatever limited resources her captor
provided. It was once she found freedom and "normalcy", she was
overwhelmed with expectations and norms, not knowing that the reason of her
happiness hadn't changed one bit. That is what we do to ourselves also, isn't
it? In a world of a billion people, we actually need just a handful, to make us
perfectly happy.. and knowing that full well, we pile on expectations, rules,
status quo and what not - just because it feels normal and almost obligatory -
not realizing the reason for our happiness hasn't changed. The idea is to feel
fully and wholly content sitting at Marine
Drive , drinking cutting chai, crunching down
peanuts and being at peace... and not sitting across each other at the latest
"Instagram-approved" eatery, heads sunk into your smartphones, having
empty conversations. The idea is choosing your happy place and deciding to stay
there even if it doesn't fit the norm.
So after shedding a bucket-full of tears
and distilling, "You're just Maa", it dawned upon me that you don't
have to take on relationships with a fear of heading for disappointments. You
don't need to fit your relationships into some cookie cutter to fetch
approvals. You just need to find your ROOM, where you are content.. and stay there!