Friendship Romance and Fiction

                I was watching the tv series ‘friends’ and a thought pop up in my mind.  We have lots of movies based on romance and love but a very few on friendship. Why is it so? I consider friendship to be more universal than romance but still when it comes to fiction, it is completely dominated by the romantic stories. The influence of romance in fiction is so high that it is considered to be a genre. You will hear people saying I am going to watch a romantic movie but how many times have you heard someone saying I am going to watch a friendship movie. It is very rare.

                ‘Friends‘ can  be considered as a good work on friendship. More than the comedy part the emotions and bonds are brilliantly depicted. But I am unable to remember many movies solely based on friendship. When I googled the friendship movies I got something like lord of rings triology and all. Yes there is an element of friendship and all in those movies but you cannot consider it primarily based on friendship. 

                So why does this fiction people hate friendship and gives so much importance to romance? Almost everyone will have friends but there are people who do not have a lover. Also friendship has no age limits even a three year old can have friends. But this romance thing happens only after an age and may be after an age the strength of romantic feelings may decay. I cannot make a final judgment on the last part as I am in my twenties and I do not know what happens at a later stage but as of now I believe so. The limit of number is also there. I mean it is difficult for one to share romance with many at same time. May be there are people who can romance more than one at same time. But as the number goes on increasing I think it is difficult to handle. Friendship does not have that kind of a limit. You can have from 1 to say a thousand or many more friends.

Now you have got an emotion which does not have age limits and almost 100  percent of people share and on other hand you have a slightly more limited emotion which many are unable to share and when you look at your movies and novels they are all completely filled by second one. That’s unbelievable. What can be underlying reason?

                When I shared my thoughts with one of my friends (note: here again when I had a doubt I shared it with my friend and not lover because I do not have a romantic counter part) he shared an interesting view point. Everyone knows about friendship and we all will have friendship with some others during one time or another. But when it comes to romance it is rare. Even though many say they have a lover we can see lots of unhappy couples around us. Also even while romancing many are looking for better relationship. So there is a lack of clarity in romance. What is it? Many don’t know. So that gives room for fictionalization or dramatization. That is a good way of looking at this. Our writers are finding it easy to fictionalize it and they are giving it to us saying this is what is called true romance.  It is more like a fantasy stuff possibilities are unlimited. Only writer’s imagination is limit.

                Now do not consider me as an ‘anti love’ or ‘I hate you’ kind of person. I just want to find out why romance dominates in fiction. If there are better arguments than above they are all welcome.

                

Dimensions of our five senses

We know the three dimensions of vision :-  length, breadth and height. The technology have learned ways of artificially stimulating the effects of 3 dimensional viewing. But when it comes to other senses what are the dimensions?   Vision is a subset of the set senses. Hence  all other members of family should have some common properties of set sense . So if we can define a set of dimensions for visions , we should be able to do it with others also.

                The five senses we have are vision, touch, smell, hear and taste. So first problem we have to tackle is whether the rule of 3 is applicable to all senses. I mean does all of the sense have got 3 dimensions . Also can we include the shade or colour as a dimension for vision. I strongly believe it can be considered as a dimension, definitely, and  it should be. Because the colour is also a feature which can be recognized by the eye and we use it along with distance, length and breadth to distinguish various objects. So now effectively vision have become a four dimensional sense.

                Now consider touch. What are the features we can learn from touch. For that I will say, close your eyes and feel through various objects in your room. What are features you can feel? Smoothness of surfaces. When you pass your hands over your bed sheet and  cover of a book you will feel different levels of finishing. Temperature or hotness. You can definitely distinguish cold and hot waters with help of touch alone. And also you can define relative size of objects with the help of touch. What about direction? If you have closed your eyes and breeze pass touching your hair then you can definitely say the direction. So we have again have four dimensions. I cannot find any others. Let me know if you can find it. I want this to be an open debate.

                Smell- I think we can only say two smells are different . No other feature can be learned with help of smell. You cannot say direction or distance of smell or any other features from smell. Same is the case with taste we can just say the difference between two tastes nothing else can be derived from it.

                Hearing is much more sophisticated than above two. We can understand direction , distance  and quality of sound. You can distinguish between sound of your two friends. So sound have got the property which can be termed quality. So sound is 3 dimensional.

Now compiling above details as below

Vision – four dimensional

Length, breadth distance and colour

Touch-four dimensional

Smoothness, hotness, size, direction

Hearing-three dimensional

Direction, distance and quality

Smell-one dimensional

Quality

Taste- one dimensional

quality