For What It Is Worth : Love

most of us at some point or the other in our lives are initiated into the world of love. for most it is the fluctuant adolesence that brings the spring of this new found emotion. others are a little late. but nonetheless it is assured that all of us know that we have been or will be there.

love, it should be agreed, is the one of the most overrated, overused, least understood words of our time. for different people it elicits diverse emotions. as diverse are the varieties that are out there for you to get. all you need to do is ask. there are the traditional varieties like motherly and fatherly loves, the sisterly and brotherly loves, and there are also in the same family, products of more exotic kinds like the sexual love, platonic love and spiritual love. if only it could be put in a box, walmart would have made a killing. $50 a kilo. well the way the world is headed, the days aren't too far away when people will bid to buy love on ebay. and some of us cant wait for that!!

but what is this word that we throw around? is it a sin to use it in vain (alongside the lord's name)? should there be a code for its usage? is it guaranteed by law? foolish as it may seem, this thing(love)can cause more agony than george w.'s union address and more joy than cold water in the sahara. listed with the merriam-webster are more than 24 entries for love and they range from the motherly mushy definitions to the more exciting amorous sexual episodes. but what i found most apt was " love : 8. a score of zero (as in tennis) ". those four words captivate the beauty of it all with a simplicity only god and the guy who invented tennis could think of. love as a score of zero symbolises the state of nullification of the intellect, the senses, the wisdom and not the least the freedom of the individual spirit. a little harsh? well, bluntly put people in love make stupid decisions(and you thought it was only in the movies). we can lie but cant deny the truth. we have all been there and those that have not as yet will so be there. and as for the senses, the diktat of love is such that for that rosy period of your life when you think you are in love, nothing can get better. yeah right! and finally all my fellow beings who have entered the bond of monogamous commitment to a fellow being will know that the freedom lost, though also in the sexual plane (homo erectus zindabad!), is more importantly of the emotional, private, social, professional and rarely spiritual kinds.

well all this said, is love a bad thing? let me characterise love for you. simply put, love is a syndrome not a single entity. it encompasses several mental and physical states which together lead to the more subjective notion. undeniably, it is first a physical attraction to a fellow being, therefore placing first the need for physical compatibility. the next step is that of personal compatibilty, the nuances of which have been elaborated time and again since the birth of society and its order. these include the usual social, professional, familial and the likes. these satisified does not yet constitute love. there has to be an essential commitment, no matter how brief, and an out-of-this-world feeling to go with it. tada! you are in love.

is it worth the trouble? well let me tell you, ideas like falling in love or that love just happens are far fetched. love or any such phenomenon is all about subconscious calculations based on comparisons of the like with like and a measurement of the unlike and how much of it one is willing to consider. this, for example, simply explains the success of arranged marriages. the couple have a wide bandwidth within which they are willing to accomodate the differences. this however is not universal. all rules have exceptions. other type of marriages, the love marriages, work a lot of the times too, provided that the participants in such a relationship subscribe less to romantic imagination and are adaptable and compromising enough to enable creation of a similar understanding. highly individual choices and independence bring with them the inevitable clash of personalities which is often shrouded by the cloak of love. once the rose coloured glasses come off, these formerly subliminal bombs surface to create all havoc.

life is all about getting what you want, making most of what's available and being content with what you have. these are the lessons learnt over millenia of civilisation which brought with them complexities of communal life, society and identity. an adaptable, understanding relationship based on mutual trust and respect with adequate scope for individual expression is the ideal foundation to experience the higher emotions of conjugation, cohabitation and coexistence. two voices come to sing as one, each retaining its unique beauty.