Sad stories

(473 words)

(2 minutes read)

I had a coffee this week with one of my secondary school classmates and chatted about virtually everything under the sun.

He is now a so-called (not medical) "doctor" and by that I mean a PhD holder (hahaha) while I deliberately didn't even pursue a Master's Degree because truthfully speaking I am not really academic at heart and only tortured myself to go through a First Degree even.

He used to live in a developed country for many years with his family until he decided to return to Maldives for personal and professional reasons.

Keeping academia aside, we have many things in common, including an intense passion for movies, especially sad ones, both English and Hindi.

He still recalls my giving him a bootleg copy of "Titanic" while he was in Male', and then sending him an "original" videotape when he was back in his island.

He told me how now he is unable to watch movies that make him sad. I told him I feel the same but that I can still sit through sad movies while the only kind of films I cannot tolerate are horror movies that have jump scares that result in my poor heart racing. (Needless to say I didn't go to watch the critically acclaimed Maldivian movie "Bavathi" because there were a few scenes of tension like that I was told).

Over the past 30 or so years, I have noticed that I am beginning to get disconnected from everything around me - like any character that appears in a Camus or Dostoevsky novel. Although I still am unable to watch horror movies, I don't feel sad when I watch sad ones. I don't know exactly when, how, or why this change came over my personality but I am not worried about it because why waste time feeling depressed over imagined fictions when life is short.

Fortunately, I am still not totally emotionally dead; I feel sad when confronted with "true stories" that are based on sad “real events”, such as ongoing famine and wars across the world.

And that also goes for feeling low over little personal mishaps and tragedies that happen to individuals or their loved ones.

For example, I was reading "The Times of India" newspaper where I came across a report dated  19 March 2021 about 24-year-old Aravind (pictured) who was declared brain dead after a serious accident, resulting in his family deciding to donate his organs to save 4 other patients. With real world examples like this, who needs to cry over sad movies?

Of course, one of my friends argues that fictional sad stories also have a function of letting us reflect, analyze and look into ourselves in depth, and thereby learn and discover characteristics about ourselves which we did not realize before. He speaks the truth as well.