Karanvir Gupta
Love the most beautiful feeling one can live undoubtedly gets umpteen hearts go dhak-dhak dhum. Nobody knows when and how it gets started, nobody knows what destiny has planned for it. Just that a random feeling which turns your world upside down and go gaga over it. Many, in fact all of us fall in love, most of them being one sided and then a quite end in a stray. Some of us get to live few years together but rarely it’s a case where ‘the love’ turns out to be both sided and then they are blessed to live together for life long. It reminds me of my best friend who found her love eight years back and she got married to him last year, this very month. One of those blessed people on earth, indeed! We all wish our love lives were just the same but they do not happen. Probably we do not realise what Love is and how to live by it.
Well love has to be an inescapable feeling when we have grown up in a milieu of extravagantly romantic movies with heart wrenching numbers which can bring tears to the girls’ eyes and make boys numb. After all that is what our source of love – Bollywood tells us.
Hands in hands walking down the lane when it suddenly rains
Tightening the grip of hands and we grow insane.
We see each other and it shall pour flowers
that too roses from the heaven
in the background plays, music of Beethoven!
And we never realise that if it shall ever happen in reality because reality is too different from our imagination of love. But without any second thought or opinion we accept this as the perfect definition of love. The fact remains that love is such an amazing feeling that will never find words to be described in a wholesome manner. So we give it a shape that is highly metaphorical and beyond existence. After all love is a feeling beyond insanity. ‘Is kambakht ishq mein’ (In this damned love), it just so happens that we feel the cool breeze flowing around, melodies surrounding space around and the soul dancing as well. But the journey of this love has a different tale to tell. It is nowhere a cake walk, neither it is a bed of roses nor it is a rainbow without rains. And we the very humans marred by this feeling keep running after it sometimes ending in a wild goose chase and sometimes finding our true soul mates.
We come across this word love very first time when we are in teens where this word is too sacred to be played around with. Though we are not sure if it is actually love or not. Then eventually love turns out to be a need when we enter our twenties but a word our societies dread the most. Love turns fearful! And then a phase in life -post marriage- where love gets killed. The love turns devil! And at the end of it we realise that we never got our true love. Love stands lost and stranded. The once thought as the most beautiful feeling has taken us by its wit. But why and how? Love puts us in dilemmas that never find an answer. Lets traverse through the journey of this touted feeling of love and its victims-us!
Teen Love: The first time when this monster called love hits us. It chases us and if not we chase it. I remember my days when this chase game was fun. Flirtatious but sounding genuine has got key, ah-ah, you better not get caught though. I remember opening books and the face of my latest crush would pop up from it, listen to a favourite song and all those stupid little activities of her would come gushing by. The best part was looking into nowhere and imagining stuff. Ah! I would generally imagine holding her tight in my arms, dancing in rain and going for long drives. Okay, that makes me blush even today. Alas, it hasn’t happened yet. But then most of us fall into this trap.
But dear teen friends, I would say you have not lived your teens if you have not fallen in for someone. You have not lived the youth if you have not fought for your “that” friend. You just haven’t lived it worth if you have not gone out of the way to do a deed for that special person. Because at the end you repent not on what you did but for things what you didn’t do. All said and done I always suggest people if you can keep a tab on yourselves then let yourselves flow freely in the feeling of love. Love, though the world calls it blind because it is the only pure feeling on this earth.
Though the parents who would read this piece would ask for my number to thrash me but dear parents trust me your children are smart and intelligent. I do agree with you that they are innocent and that’s the reason why you are there. Parent them, share with them but do not stop them from experiencing such emotions. You go and ask any psychologist and s/he would tell you that emotions are very important for overall development of a child. So parent them in a good light. For the time being hey fellas, go get a life, enjoy your teens , enjoy this span of crushes and infatuations but Beware!
Then comes the times where Love is not so rosy but more action packed. Yes the youthful twenties! A lot many things that force us to keep a decent distance from this feeling though our hearts want to take this holy dip.
The Youthful love: On one hand where we desperately want to have one special person in our life, the other hand our society holds us back. Love turns out to be the most dreaded word, feared by parents, feared by us. And eventually it takes the form of Love vs Arranged. I am an ardent believer in this feeling of love but I somehow do not side by any of the extremists who weigh one over the other. Guys, you can’t decide if which one is better. You never know when love marriage turns to be a total no-no and when an arrange marriage relationship lasts till eternity. The point is we are stranded in the midst of Indian and western values. We want to get married but then we want it to be love marriage. But we forget that marriage in our society is just not binding of two individuals but confluence of two families as a whole. We are not ready to accept this fact and we are lost. It pains me to hear anything against either love marriage or arrange marriage.
I say if you find someone, go get married to that person. And if you do not, please do not turn cold feet on the thought of arrange marriage. To the elders I say please do not thrust upon your choices on your children. I ask you one thing how can you force your children to marry someone whom s/he doesn’t even know. There are chances that there intellectual levels do not match, the wavelength doesn’t match and nor do there interests. Keep hand on your hearts, dear elders, and tell me if you have never once in your life thought what a fuss I am in? And just because of the social obligations you continue to be one in front of society howsoever, backdoor you live two different lives. Don’t you call it hypocrisy? I request the parents and elders of our society to give room to the love marriages. With your experiences make the life of your children more beautiful rather than drudging them into world of reluctance and denial.
There is nothing wrong in love marriage. Hats Off to those who went ahead and married a person of their choice. You have my respect!
And to my modern friends, just because of the fact that ‘love marriage’ seems modern enough, do not chase it. Love will never happen by force. It is quite possible that you get your true love after marriage.
Married Couples and Love: Marriage which I believe to be the Final Destination of love is I do not know why a story of compromises and adjustments. Few cite the age gap as the problem, and few say the wavelengths do not match. Probably you want to say Dilip Kumar and Saira Bano are fools. Anyone would scoff at it! It’s all in the mind. In the race of earning livelihood and bringing up children, the couple just forgets that it is their duty to find time for each other. Though the responsibilities come as freebie with this relationship but then it is one of the most sacred relationship existing on earth. After all it is this relationship that gives you legal power to procreate.
One can never point fingers at one of the two. The couple needs to let go each other’s mistakes. Be more accepting of each other than lamenting. Nobody is perfect in this world and relationships especially marriage is one such relation where accepting each other with their imperfections is the key. The couple should be complementing each other. I feel bad whenever I see or hear couples fighting. The whole problem can be boiled down to one single point; the mind blocks about marriage. It is seen and perceived as adjustment, compromise and sacrifice of your own choices. The day we start thinking about it as sharing, caring and respecting each other, marriage will turn out to be the final destination of love. The problem is changing the attitude of one person alone doesn’t solves the problem. The effort has to be both sided. And it is here where men fail more often than women.
Go find time for each other. Spend some quality time together. Saying those three words again would not do you any harm. Confess your feelings, just for reassurance. Gifts though are not any measure of love but they remind your partner that you think about him/her even when they are not near you. LOVE FREELY, LIVE FREELY!
(The writer is a Software Engineer in Chennai)
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