Crying - Physically challenged - Television

Laughter is the best medicine. Let me tell you.. tears are equally good. A friend of mine tells me she cries for no reason at all some times and it helps her to feel better. Well.. that might be a bit weird, but the point is that crying helps. Whatever the reason may be,I have this new found love for crying. Laughing makes you feel happy, crying makes you feel good... sometimes crying makes you feel better. Living all by yourself without your loved ones around is a strange experience. You feel that something is wrong but it's hard to understand what that is. Sometimes all you need is someone to ask you "What's wrong?". I am not creating sympathy here but I wish to analyze my emotions in a not so emotional fashion. When you miss home you don't exactly know what you miss about it. When you are sad, you rarely know what exactly you desire to make you feel better. Sometimes all it takes is to fool the system with a few tears. You share your sorrows with a friend... how does it make the situation any different?; but you often feel better, relieved or supported. Crying is similar... it's a drug. However it needs a trigger and it's not easy to cry. People who often cry are experts with this trigger. People who don't cry often can't cry because they don't know how.

I found this Japanese Series on stage6 called "1 litre of tears". I started watching this initially because I thought the girl in the lead role was too cute and also due to my recent craze for the Japanese language. But as the name suggests it is a very good tear trigger. I am so in love with the quality of this series, the acting, the background score and the direction and it has a very touching story. It is about a girl who suffers from spinocerebral ataxia by which she loses all her physical faculties slowly. Her slow degeneration from the age of 15 till she dies at 25 is well portrayed with the highlight on the difficulties she faces in the society and the hardship she faces in realizing herself that she's not the "normal" person in school anymore. This is based on the diary of Aya Ikeuchi, originally intended to inform her doctor about the progress of the disease. This kind of a series in my view is definitely a good way to bring about awareness in the media about physically challenged people. It makes one understand things about disabled people we would normally otherwise not think about. I injured my knee last year this time and I had to undergo surgery to fix it. I was so to say "handicapped" for a few months deprived of my very basic physical activities like running. It took me 3 months to get my walk proper. I am not saying I am in a better position to understand the disabled but I know what it feels like to see people around you walking 3 miles to downtown to watch a movie or playing in a sunday league soccer tournament. I can understand what frustration is. I wonder what I would have done without my friends who always made sure my spirits were high. They even agreed not to give me my birthday bums :). So I could relate to this story where Aya Ikeuchi talks about how her friends made her life less miserable. Once she says "Just being alive is a lovely and wonderful thing". Very true, isn't it? People keep talking about luck and fortune these days... I ask how greedy can one get? Anyways I seriously recommend "1 litre of tears" to our Indian housewives and nannies if they are really fond of crying. It is much more meaningful than our commercial soap operas. Cry for the good I say!