Kolkata Chronicles- Part 2

Love is in the air. Scientifically that's an impossibility because air is basically a mixture of several gases and 'love' is definitely not on of them. But if you're an eighteen-year-old girl just starting out with college in Kolkata after newly arriving in the city, you might just start believing that 'love' is something people  breathe in this city.

In my old school, there were very few couples. As harsh as it sounds for me to say this, a lot of these couples had a dumb girl and a stud-type boy in them. Dating wasn't a very big craze. I mean, me and my best friends never even thought about it....Okay, so maybe we did but not that much. By the time we graduated high school most of these relationships had dissolved into friendships. We knew we would mostly be going to different colleges, in some cases even in very different parts of the country.And no matter how much anybody claimed to know about love and relationships, the truth is at the back of our mind that some things don't stand the test of time and distance and its better to end them on a sweet note than drag them till they tear apart.

I didn't have a boyfriend in high school. In all honesty, I wasn't exactly the prettiest or most popular girl in school either and boys didn't particularly want to be with me. It didn't matter because I had friends who were just like me and we had all the fun and bonding we needed. Now, I knew people have boyfriends in college, but when I got here, I saw a lot of people had already been in relationships and it was a very common thing too. I mean, girls my age can very casually say, "You know, my boyfriend did so-and-so and then we went there and doesn't like me going and blah blah blah" and nobody listening will even blink an eyelid.

That was just the first part. Then I saw twelve-year-olds walking hand-in-hand down the street. Some people find it cute. I find it funny.

My first reaction to all this was, well, jealousy. I know it sounds bad, but how're you supposed to feel when everybody around you has a boyfriend/girlfriend and you don't have a single guy paying you any special attention to you? I mean, I go to a good college and have some awesome writing credentials and successfully completed a marathon. I'm very low maintenance, don't spend much on clothes and make-p and take fifteen minutes to take a shower and  get dressed (you have to admit that's impressive for a girl). I'm a catch, people? How come nobody sees that.

Okay, so I was just kidding in the last paragraph. My first reaction was, well, nothing. Yes, I do think people start dating a little early in Kolkata, with every school probably having a lot of couples. And yes, I don't understand relationships and don't particularly want to be in one. But maybe that's just because I'm not ready for it or because I grew up surrounded by people who very cute and childish about these matters. I mean, we talked about Robert Pattinson but never thought about what it would be like to actually be with a boy. But that doesn't mean I will be judgemental about people who date at a young age. But still, I reserve the right to laugh when I see twelve-year-olds acting like they're madly in love. I'm in Kolkata, which is evidently a very romantic city, but there's a lot of time before it rubs off on me. Till then, I'm going to watch others fall in and out of love and be just a wallflower in this department.

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