In hot water

BENGALURU:  Frogs, if dunked into a pot of boiling water, will get scalded and immediately hop away to safer places. However, if you take a frog, drop it in a pot with cool water, put the pot on low heat and let the pot warm up slowly, the frogs just go about their lives even as the water around them gets warmer. It doesn’t occur to them that the water is getting uncomfortable - they manage to adjust to the heat and continue about their business. This happens till the water gets just too hot, the frog cannot adjust any further and just gets boiled to death. 

I don’t know if this is a scientifically validated truth, or a parable of sorts, but either way, if you think we as people are a lot smarter than a frog, think again. Just look at how we are in love and relationships, for starters. We may not be standing in pools and going “Ribbit! Ribbit!’ searching for love, but there is something distinctly frog-like in how we are with the people we love. If we meet someone and they are just truly awful at the very beginning, we would just run away from them, block them, ghost them and do whatever we need to do to never have to see them again – something akin to a frog being scalded by boiling water. 

However, if the same thing happens slowly, where we start off on an even keel, cool and comfortable, floating around in blissful joy, and then the heat is turned on slowly, with a little fight here, some hurtful comments and a few disparaging, contemptuous remarks peppering one’s days, then we often find ourselves getting cooked like the frog on the simmering pot on the stove. 

Looking from the outside, one might think that it shouldn’t be hard at all to see that something is not okay and that the person needs to get out, but for the person in the relationship, it might be quite challenging. We often put up with a lot of nonsense, not even realising our very lives might be at stake. It happens to the best of us. 

We could blame love for blinding us to the point of ignoring our own wellness, but it is not just that. On a global scale, we are not only blissfully adjusting to a warming planet, but we are also actively stoking the fires, making it hotter and hotter, and cooking ourselves to death!  

We are all frogs in a climate crisis cooking pot in that sense, but maybe we could do better in love and relationships in the meantime.

(The views expressed by the writer are their own)

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