Laban's story

An alternate world view

Laban had this exemplary capacity to look at those issues from other angles and perspectives and was not averse to the possibility of an alternative story that defined his life.

It may have been perhaps the fact of his having been to 6 schools before he settled for some time in his 7th school in standard V that he found that all his relationships ended before it even started. So he was averse to any relationship at a deeper level because at the back of his mind there was this anxiety that the relationship would soon end. Alternately he also found a reason to keep the friends away sometimes by regressing and sometimes by finding a fault in the other. In any case he dreaded emotional attachments and felt at ease with a routine touch and go variety of relationship as in a school or in an office where one met others for reasons of chance and for reasons other than affection. This gave a façade of friendliness that ended in the evening only to be re-masked the next day.

The downside of this pattern was that home or any of such retirement was more as an inn rather than a home. At home he preferred to take rest sometimes with a book and mostly by himself. This gave some advantages because books by definition gave him a world view of his that was ahead of his class/ work mates. But by itself it could become an addiction.

Speaking of addiction it was not absent in his home either. His father was in a similar quandary. He was in the defense and took to alcohol and soon fell into it. By the time Laban got married the father was a complete wreck, but in moments of sobriety he was above normal in his public relations with the result that he led a double life with one face to the world and a much despicable one to the family members. It went to such extent that Laban had to intervene. It is not out of place to say that Laban’s energies were thus diverted and he soon forgot that his family needed tending. It was more that the intuitive priority neglected the actual priority. He was thus in a quandary that if he preferred to tend to his family he would lose the ancestral family but if he tended the ancestral one there was a risk of losing his own………….