For Love, With Love

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!!