The valentine season is here
and the “season of love” will start. How long the season lasts depends on each
one of us – for some it is a day long and for some a full year long. As for me,
I am somewhere in the middle. Where exactly I stand is for my wife to say (PS –
she often calls me Aurangzeb. That will give you a good idea of where I stand
on this scale). The western world has done such a great job of popularising the
valentine’s day that it would today be undoubtedly the second most global
festival after Christmas.
Love is the most universal
emotion. It is also the most complex. Most other emotions derive themselves
from love. To put it the other way, if all emotions are the languages of the
world, love is Sanskrit – the purest and the mother of all languages. But what I really like about love is its
complexity, the infinite shades that this one emotion creates. Let us look at some
of them -
We love our spouses (specially
applicable for newly weds) J
We love our parents
We love our siblings
We love our friends
We love our country
We love film
stars/sportspersons/legends
We love a subject
We love a political
party/leader
We love our gadgets
We love holidays
We love weekends
We love a place/destination
We love food
We love movies/TV shows
We love being in love
We love our kids (until they
become rebellious teenagers) J
We love our jobs (well I do) J
We love our in laws (I do that
too) J
We love our dreams
We love being desired
We love winning
We love our hobbies
We love all material things
We love the nature/environment
We love our schools/colleges
The list can be very long. The
point here the complexity of love, it is in different shades for all the above
states that I have listed above.
Love is universal. All people
have love in their life - they may not just feel it. Adolf Hitler loved to hate
the Jews. Osama Bin Laden loved to hate the Americans. You see, this emotion is
everywhere. Even animals have it. Let’s keep the basic needs (unless they are
confused with emotions) like hunger, rest, sleep, pain etc away and we realise
that love is one of the evolved emotion that even animals have.
Love is paradoxical. Love
seems to be free. But it only “seems” to be so. Ask any lover who is splurging
on his/her loved one. It is nowhere near free. Bollywood has made an entire
industry around love. The multiplex tickets today do not keep it anywhere near
the free category.
Love is a great equaliser. We
can love the ones more gifted than us or the ungifted (Rahul Gandhi is an
exception in this – he is universally unloved except for his part chamchas). We
can love those better off than us financially or worse off. We can love someone
from the current generation or the previous. We can love someone from our
country or the outside. We can love someone with the same value system as ours
or totally different.
Love is everlasting. Look at
the marvels that the world has created in the tribute to their loved ones. The
Taj Mahal is the best example. Even the characters in love are everlasting –
Romeo and Juliet, Heer and Ranjha, Laila and Majnu.
Love is liberating. If you
could love everything and everyone the way saints did.
Love is also empowering and
motivating.
Love brings out the best in
us, the lack of love brings out the worst.
Too much of love will never
cause you a disease or get you in trouble, unless you are confusing love with
lust!!
Love is pure. Love is
unconditional.
Love is passionate. It is also
compassionate.
Love is magical.
This Valentines day let us
decide to spread love around us and also be expressive about it. It is such a
beautiful feeling, why keep it inside? We should spread enough of it around to
come back to us.
Its a lovely thought, isn’t it!!
No comments:
Post a Comment