Platonic Love

"If parting hurts so much… why love?"

These are the lines from the movie “Shadowlands”. A brilliant drama on how life coexists with joy and sorrow, love and pain, ups and downs... A man falls in love with a lady who is going to die in months. He makes all efforts to keep her and himself happy. At one of their happy moments, she tells him “the happiness now is part of the sadness then”. After her death he lives with sorrow all his life accepting the truth “the sadness now is part of the happiness then”...

Ponder...

“Some day, and that day may never come,

I would like to call upon you to do me a service in return.”

Yes, you got it correct. It’s “The Godfather”. I watched it again and was overwhelmed again! And these are the lines the Don says to Bonsera (in the first scene) after accepting to help him. The Don never accepts money but friendship for his service. It kept me thinking for a little while!

Power

Off late, I have been watching quite a few English movies, mostly the Drama category ones. The recent one was the "Schindler's List"- a true story of Oskar Schindler, a businessman who tries to make his fortune during the Second World War by exploiting cheap Jewish labor, but ends up saving 1100 Polish Jews from almost certain death during the Nazi reign. The Survivors and their generations (numbering about 6000 today) belong to a new religion "Schindler" Jews! More than me talking about the movie, I will recommend you to watch the movie. But I am tempted to tell about the conversation of a Nazi officer (who kills Jews mercilessly) and Schindler on what is power? The Nazi officer claims that he has power as he can kill or punish anyone. Schindler gives a beautiful definition of power. It goes like this... "Power is when we have every justification to kill and we don't. That's power. That's what the emperors had. A man stole something, he's brought in before the emperor, he throws himself down on the floor, he begs for mercy, he knows he's going to die... and the emperor pardons this worthless man. He lets him go. That's power. If you kill him, that's not power, that's justice." This changed my paradigm towards the definition of power. Does it for you?