Chocolates AND strawberries

You all must know that there are two types of people traversing the earth. First, are the cool ones who love chocolate and second are the lame ones who love strawberries. And I hope you are intelligent enough to guess which type of person I am B|- Chocolate of course .

Every individual has a love story. More importantly and specifically – Every individual has a love story of how they fell for chocolate  or strawberry  We gift each other chocolates for birthdays – not fancy strawberries . Some may have strawberry flavored chocolate. But since the name chocolate is involved – chocolate rocks.

This is how I sounded for a long time . And then one day I tasted strawberries accidentally – it was love at first sight.

Okay , what is she SAYING?

For those who didn’t get it already , “I am using a metaphor to convey a larger social message” Those who don’t know what a metaphor means please  leave  google it.

Okay  I’ll cut the know- it- all attitude. Owning some blogspace can do that to you . Metaphors are otherwise known as examples / illustrations. Thu :P

Coming back to chocolates and strawberries….

Life goes like this ->

Like many , I fell in love with chocolates pretty easily and very quickly. And for strawberries.. they had a negative stereotype of girliness ( I am a {tom}girl though) and were/are very hard to find in burning hot Chennai. Whatever strawberry I did manage to taste were rotten by the chennai weather and more importantly by my unconscious prejudice against the poor fruit.

My point is not that strawberries are actually delicious. It is that I never gave myself a chance to enjoy it . I was so preoccupied on protecting my ideology that chocolates > strawberries and so obsessed on winning vocal battles that I closed my eyes to the obvious . If I had gone in with an open mind and hated strawberries – then that is my personal opinion- but since I hated it prematurely because it is in the wrong side of chocolate it is a social problem of stereotypes.

I didn’t even care to research or know about strawberries . After all that fruit would never be a part of my life. However one day ,my dad came home with ‘strawberries’ his boss had gifted him and forced me to take a bite. Reluctantly I took a bite. And yay!! I was right after all. The outer coat was so bitter and the inner part tasted weird too, Nothing like the strawberry icecream we taste in shops . It took me a long time to realise that I should have only the inner part. And it took me a longer time to realise that they were lychees and not strawberries .

I could blame the third party –dad for this confusion. But it is my own ignorance which put me to shame and not his. He in fact never specified what fruit it was. I just assumed they were strawberries – and hated them.

Chocolates and strawberries? They sound too trivial for us to even batter an eyelid. However in actuality there is a much larger problem in hand here. We’re brought up in a society where there is an invisible and ever existent divide between every object – man made and human made . You love pink? You must hate blue! You love Rajini? You must hate kamal! You love India? You must hate Pakistan! See how things escalate?

If we lived in isolation from these opposites it maybe okay (in the smallest way possible) to hate them .And more often than not we have to wear our least favorite color or watch a film of our ‘least’ favorite actor to impress someone. So it is better to understand if we truly hate something or not. I have a friend who hates Hrithik Roshan simply because she loves sharukh khan. Again..what?!

The other day , I watched the 104768^th tamil masala action film produced in the tamil film industry named jilla. The protagonist who initially supports his mafia leader father becomes a police officer (yes , it is indeed ridiculous) . When his don dad asks him why he has switched sides he says , “ When I was with you , I liked what you did. When I came here I just saw the other side and I like this better”Hardly an eureka moment but that is the maximum you can get from a yesteryear cheesy sentimental action film . It does make a lot of sense though. Only when he was forced to become a police, he saw the atrocities of a don (although the moral grounds are indigestible for this argument)

What I am asking is – Why should it be an or question always? Why chocolates or strawberries? Why not embrace all forms of yummy items? ( ignore the diabetes question here) Why should we be pushed to a corner to love something new?

We get too settled with our favorites. We must constantly branch out and experiment new flavors to remain exotic. Midlife crisis shouldn’t be the reason you go for a world tour.

Finally this is my basic thought for the day - Only if you can try you can taste , and only if you can  taste you can fall in love. Don’t let your love for something be the reason for you hating something else.

Hope you got my flow of thought

Semi