Judgement & Classification of relationships may be the cure!

Life hinges of relationships, a wide variety of them in fact. Everyone of us have different levels of relationships we have do deal and maintain day in and day out. On the personal front we have ones ranging from parents, grand parents, siblings, spouse to cousins, aunts & uncles and friends. On the work front we have those ranging from cubicle-mates, team-mates, colleagues, people we report to, people who report to us, acquaintances and few friends too. We have many more relationships at the social level too.

It would not be an understatement to say that one, few or all these relationships decide how we live our lives. Now, let me start doing justice to the title of this write up.

The success of a relationship depends of whether the person who we are in a relationship with has been properly classified under the category we put him/her in. It is not uncommon to see two people getting along really well as friends but end up becoming a bad pair. Equally common is to see two people get along very well as acquaintances and the relationship becomes screwed up when they become friends. This list is endless irrespective of which sphere of life we are in.

And at the end of it we think "Shit.. if only I had left things at the previous level, things would have been much better!" This, I call is the typical result of improper judgement & classification of relationships. Things work out between two people only at a certain level and not necessarily at every possible level and it is this knack that decides whether a person is successful at handling relationships or not.

I am of the opinion that, this judgement as to which level of relationship to be with whom that is the cure for all the troubles arising around maintaining relationships.

Running tracker

S.no Run When Timing

1. Hyd 1ok run Nov. 2007 50 mins

2. Hyd half marathon Nov. 2008 2 hrs 30 mins

3. Half marathon Sept. 2009 2 hrs 28 mins

4. Hyd 10k run Nov. 2009 52 mins

The Hyd 10 k run - Chaotic organizing!

Though I haven't been in the best of shapes recently due to skipping training sessions for playing cricket and writing, I was in a decent enough form to compete for the first time in a long distance running event. The good news was that, more than 100 people signed up from Google, which meant we got a corporate registration. This also meant I would compete only against men from other corporates.

Having completed the 10 k run in 50 mins way back in Nov 2007 coupled with my redeemed passion for running after that, I knew I had fair chance of making it to the top 5 under the 'corporate men' category. With this confidence I headed to Necklace road with Shyam in time

( in fact ahead of time per Indian standards.)

We were all instructed to get near the stage inside the ground so that the run could commence. I was pretty happy on getting there with only few hundreds in front of me and I thought it was my day with destiny to make to the winner's list. The usual cine-stars came, spoke and got thunderous ovations for whatever they spoke.

After a couple of minutes, the MC asked everyone to get ready for the race and called upon some celebrity to flag off the race. He flagged off and no one ran. I was looking around and re-confirmed that no one ran. After a minute or so, the MC instructed everyone to head via their nearest gate to start running. Apparently, when the celebrity flagged off, people started from starting point on the road. This starting point on the road was about 200 mts from the stage and given the per sq.km density at that point in time, about 2-4k people would have been there between the stage and the starting point.

How am I supposed to know this, when clearly instructed half an hour before "Please come into the ground near the stage so that we can start off the race.?" I had to literally wrestle with so many people rushing from all sides and jump over a wall to get to the starting point at the earliest. By then there were so many hundreds converging from all directions. I for a moment wondered whether it was the 10 K run or a street wrestling event.

This pissed me off to say the least. It did much more harm than just pissing me off. There were so many people ahead of me walking at the most relaxed pace they ever could and the only thing I could do was to jog few meters, walk few meters, push few people, get pushed by many more, bump into strangers and then apologize and do everything else but run.

This continued for more than a km by which I decided, there is no way I could make a top 5 finish. The crowd cleared up after some time, I gradually picked up pace and kept the rhythm going until 9 kms after which I switched gears to finish strongly at 52 mins. ( I thought I had it in me to come with a 45-46 min finish) If only there were clear instructions as to the exact point where the race started, thing would have been different.

Shit happens!

Speak it out people!

I have been friends with Jacqueline for close to 2 years now. But, because of our busy work lives, assumptions we made about each other, the fights that arose because of this, we demoted the friendship to an acquaintanceship . But one day it struck me how stupid it was from our sides to not sort out our differences and continue maintaining a cold relationship despite the fact that we were very good friends in the making.

It took the effort of a mutual friend to tell us that we had to speak out things to re-discover the friendship. It just took close to twenty minutes of talking for us to get back on track. And hence, the miracle happened.

I am very happy that we are close to becoming the friends we were a couple of years ago. So, the moral of the story is "speak it out people!"