Saturday, July 6, 2013

Love, convenience and consumerism

I am fed up these days, or may be to be more precise I am fed up for a long time in general. But this article is not to speculate the wiring in my brain, so I will discuss the current reason that makes me feel annoyed. Whenever I log into face book these days, I see an “amazingly cute” couple declaring their “eternal love” for each other. You might be surprised, how on earth two people in love can annoy me! Let me speak before you complete your judgment. I am not complaining about falling in love. Am sure it is amazing, although all my life the grass on my side has been pretty dull, so may be to some subconscious level my grapes are sour. But consciously I have some other issues with these couples. Most of them claim that they were made for each other and some higher force helped them in getting together. But when I look closely I see they are from the same country, ethnicity, skin colour, educational background, financial status, age group, and most importantly similar “attractiveness”. I find it extremely difficult to understand and hence digest how so many things can magically match to make an amazing love story. I start wondering is it really love or just a convenience? That brings us to the question “what is love”. I wish I had an answer, although even if I did, with my reputation no one will believe it. But still my speculative and argumentative mind runs in ten directions for an answer. And what I come up with is a definition by negation, which is, I can define “what love is not” most probably rather than what it is. According to me when two people, nearly a clone to each other, claim love, what they are doing is mostly trying to find a support in what they believe in. To me it becomes like garlanding your image in the mirror. And hence this is not love, it is rather a very primal narcissistic ritual. We all suffer from lack of confidence to some level, this type of love helps us in winning the weakness. All these brutal attacks on love and the people in love, but that does not mean I am looking for my love in someone who is completely opposite to me. Some level of agreement and acceptance is very important in a relationship, but a relationship where there are only agreements sounds very unattractive to me. For me love is not how many things we agree upon, rather it is how many disagreements we can live with happily. My grandmother, a wise woman of yesteryear, used to always tell us difference of opinion does not necessarily lead to a conflict of hearts. I could never appreciate that and so I had a conflict with her on this issue forever! But now that she is gone and I have started to tear open my gray cells every moment I think I see what she meant and why I could not see her point earlier. As I mentioned, she and her likes were from a generation of scares, where there were very few options in life. Be it material, spiritual or romantic. So whatever they got they speculated, concentrated and appreciated upon that. On the other hand we, and more so the generation which followed us, came in to this world with the option of 300+ TV channels, 1000+ brands of cloths, 50000+ options for food and so on and so forth. So for us it was always what suits me the best, an incessant effort to match my appetite without even considering if I satisfy anyone else’s appetite. Do not misunderstand me when I say these that I am saying getting stuck with whatever you have, good or bad, is the ultimate mantra to moksha in love. What I am saying is just be very mindful when you split your hair and decide good from bad. Define very critically how and what you mean by good. If good is just agreement then most probably you have got it wrong somewhere. After all in this world of consumerism we are not pressed with options as the characters in “Pride and Prejudice” or the two women in “Chokher Bali” and we need to be very careful with this ultrafevourable situation.

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