Monday, March 31, 2014



The 'L' Word



Love has been transcending as a phenomenon through ages, as the most central of all the feelings and emotions, that the people have known since their existence. Love has been the abstract form of what has bonded humans and acted as a basis of human connection. Love has been galvanized in word, poetry or picture across all the civilizations  through tales, legends and songs of love. Every civilization has love in the form of sanguinary tales or the serene and soft love stories.Incidentally, love has been irrationally associated with the heart, an absolute simile portraying love as the most central of all human emotions just as the heart is the most central of all the human parts.

Scientifically, a neurohypophysial hormone called ‘Oxytocin’, the so called love hormone, activates feelings of trust and attraction between people when it is released in the brain. Is love just a hormone induced repercussion? And is everyone just dancing to the symphonies composed by our hormones?

World over, there is a plethora of fabled lovers in a lost cause. There are instances like  Romeo and Juliet, Odysseus and Penelope, Antony and Cleopatra, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler in the west and simliarly Layla and Majnun in Persia, Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai in China or Heer and Ranjha in India. There are fables of unrequited lovers, most of which were later recreated in cinema. There are even fables where unrequited love is canvassed as the form of love which keeps the flame of the soul burning forever, for only an unrequited lover who lived all his life, hoping for his unrequited love to put water into his beds of devotion, where he has sown his seeds of love.          

One really doesn't have to gasp for love and despise happiness if they don’t get the person they love , for there is love in every relation and every small experience with a person involves love of some kind , however minuscule it is.If one does what he likes and appreciates thankfully whatever he has, then all the positivity and feelings which bring us cheer and joy with whoever the person it is- friends, family, etc
There is nothing like perfect love, for it’s a Utopian concept of everything perfectly falling into place and seldom are any relationships perfect, or are they?

            Love is an overrated illusion, these days, because people spend lives looking for love 'out there', while in reality they are essentially seeking someone out there, to love them, to make them feel happy and make them feel better about themselves, when actually, that love is within them all the time. That might make you ponder; Does love make your happiness and sadness dependent on someone else, outside you?

          While the world’s obsession with Love, will increase everyday, with each song /movie / book etc about love, maybe a level of introspection is required as to whether love is actually a coup de foudre. And maybe the following lines from ‘Fountainhead’ can be enlightening perhaps

Excerpts from FOUNTAINHEAD ,by  Ayn Rand:

“Personal love is a great evil- as everything personal. It always leads to misery. Personal love is an act of discrimination, of preference. Its an act of injustice- to every human being on earth whom you rob of the affection arbitrarily granted to one. Love all men equally. But one cannot achieve so noble an emotion if one doesn’t kill his selfish little choices. They are vicious and futile- since they contradict the first cosmic law, i.e “The basic equality of men”.

Love has been glorified through ages, thanks to glossy portrayal of it through various media- books, cinema.  At the same time it has also been marauded by elucidation, because of the notion that love hurts and emboldens depression which is so untrue. Its rejection that hurts , it’s the fear of losing someone that emboldens depression, not love.