“We had been married for nearly twenty years....I had tried my utmost to understand her...I often wondered if I really knew her or understood her....Sometimes looking into her eyes, I would find a stranger peeping out at me.”

    This is Jawaharlal Nehru, musing while his wife Kamala was undergoing treatment in Germany. A ‘stranger’ after twenty years married life. Of course Nehru was busy in the freedom struggle and in and out of the prison for most of the time. How much time we need to understand a person? It is not the length of time that matters. It is our desire to know, to understand, that is important. This may apply to most of us. I do not know whether I know my wife as a woman, as an individual, as a person, a human after fifty five years of our married life. Again this is true of many of our relationships—parents, siblings, grand parents and friends, with whom we spend most of our waking....