The Harishes of My Life

     It is not everyday that I think of how many people with a particular name I know, and how they have helped in shaping my life's course into being what it is. Well, I strongly believe that when you are the part of someone's life, maybe even like an extra in a Bollywood movie, you change their life in some way. Like, for example, there is this person walking towards my direction on a footpath, and I am walking towards him/her. We come at a point where I have to decide whether to choose to go to his/her right or left. He/she forces me to take a decision, maybe very trivial in nature, but a decision  that is.
     I have been thinking all evening about the number of Harishes that I have met in my life, of whom I have at least one fond/ not-so-fond memory. Well, the youngest Harish I remember having been a part for a considerable period of time should be Harish Iyer/Nair/Menon/Whatever. We were classmates in our standard-V. I was a class monitor then, and would often chide him for his conduct in class. (This kinda sounds really funny.) I have no memory of his after that incident, except that I was not very friendly with him.
     Another Harish that has helped shape a part of me is my cousin Harikrishnan Iyer. Pet-names! I had this self-built communication barrier between us both and I really never knew what kind of a person he was, not before just recently when we talked to each other heart-to-heart. But today, we bond like a house on fire. I am known to be extremely objective while speaking things, and talking to myself, and considering what others speak to be rubbish. But bringing things to my mind, he did a good deal of it.

     Well, the third Harish I know is the known children-and-gay rights activist, an alumnus of St. Xavier's, my college. He has shaped my life like no one else has. Coming out of the closet was my idea. But the credit for doing it all, at least providing the initial impetus, goes to him. I met him on a road, finally, unexpectedly. But then, things happen.

      Like I like to say,

Welcome, to the world of strange things.

     I'll be possibly seeing  a number of people with the same names. Different personae. Maybe a name does not matter as long as you are what you are. But it does bring back old memories. Old thoughts you had deserted. Longings and cravings you had learnt to silence. And then, you remember it all. You look at how you look at things in the present and then you smile. And things start looking a lot better then.