The Myth

The previous parts of this article are here: Preface, Part 1, Part 2,Part 3, Part 4, & Part 5.

I think I have rambled enough about love now. So, let me end the current series of posts on love with a short and satirical poem.

THE MYTH

"What is love?"

That's the question

You have to let go of

Like a loved one

With tenderness

And utmost care

For you can't address

Why life's unfair

Actually, no one can

No guru, no saint

Nor a medicine man

Knows love's true intent

Love's incomprehensible

So don't treat it

Like a statistical table

Instead ignorance you admit

And treat it with

Veneration and respect

Like you do for a myth

From times past perfect.

-- The End --

What The Love!

On the eve of Valentine's day, I feel lucky and proud to belong to a generation that openly celebrates love. Ours is probably the first generation that can say with pride that we literally fell in love. Prior to our generation, it was all arranged marriages, but our generation changed the marriage market for ever when an overwhelmingly large number from our generation decided to go for love, or at least, love-cum-arranged marriages. Had it not been for our love and love-cum-arranged marriages, could the current twenty somethings, ever have imagined to have graduated to the level of living-in relationships? Unfortunately, there are a few prudes who still believe that living-in relationships are wrong. Well, you can't blame stupid people. They aren't wise enough to understand that marriage is a sure killer of romance. Take my parents' life for instance. I have never heard them once say those beautiful words "I love you" to each other. From what I know they didn't even utter those beautiful words before their marriage. In fact, they hardly uttered any words at all before their marriage. How boring and unromantic! In comparison, our generation is so much better. We are constantly whispering "I love you" into our beloved's ears. We text message those words, and if that weren't enough, we splash those words on our beloved's Facebook wall. Now that's what you call is an open and romantic society!

To think about it, I doubt my parents even loved each other. Because if they did, why didn't they say "I love you" to each other? You know expressing our feelings through words is so important. The important thing is that it is so much more efficient than having to do all the work that you otherwise goes into a relationship. My mom, for instance, cooked super delicious meals for my father everyday. She also did the laundry for the whole house, and all that by hand, because those days we didn't have a washing machine. Can you imagine how stupid my mom was?  If she had any wisdom, she would have only uttered those magical three words, "I love you" regularly. Instead, she chose the hard way of expressing her love through her actions.

Well, I don't blame my mother, because my dad wasn't any smarter either. For some weird reason, he always came home straight from work. Which stupid man does that these days? Shouldn't he have gone to a bar to hung out with his friends? But no! He preferred to come home, and work in our huge vegetable garden, tilling land, preparing compost, picking weeds, etc. That supposedly provided us with a lot of fresh and healthy vegetables for free. You know how these old generation people are: they just want everything for free! It's so much more convenient to buy things from the supermarket. But no! My unromantic dad preferred to sweat it out in the garden. He even dug a small pond, all by himself, so that he could harvest water, and water the plants without using a drop of the city water supply. According to him, the city water was meant for physical consumption only.

What I mentioned above are only small glimpses of the insipid existence of my parents. I didn't want to go into too much details and bore you more. I just wonder why it never occurred to my parents that life would have been so much easy if they knew the value of expressing love through words and gifts. Definitely, none of them would have had to slog so much, if they regularly exhibited their love through romantic gestures. But alas, my parents preferred to spend their lives working for each other. Can you believe that they never bought chocolate for each other? My naive mom thought it was more loving to cook traditional Indian sweets for the entire family and even our neighbors. Today, we are so lucky that we can easily purchase heart-shaped chocolates for our darlings. And we communicate how much we care by gifting huge teddy bears. It obviates the need to tend for each other during each other's sickness. We go out and have romantic candle light dinners. But unfortunately, my parents knew nothing more than kerosene lantern dinners. I'm completely flabbergasted how their marriage survived without the overtures of modern day romantic love. Surely, it was not love. It can't be, because there were no signs of romance. How can a relationship exist without a rose bouquets, pink hearts, cherry-filled chocolates? My parents relationship must have been the old fashioned co-dependency! Thankfully, our generation has found true romantic love. Happy Valentine's Day!!!

Post 1.0

Every New Year people resolve to change some aspect of their lives. Most of them fail dismally. Research shows that people make the same resolutions year after year, on average, for about 10 times. Of course, not all fail. But the success statistics aren't exactly encouraging. Among those who succeed, successful change happens only after attempting the same resolution for 6 times, on average.

I don't know about you, but these statistics appear pretty depressing to me, especially, because the figures are not from the yellow press. These are figures from top-tier peer reviewed journals in psychology. So, is personal change that difficult? Do we fool ourselves when we vow to start a new life? If we make the same resolutions for about 10 times, on what basis do we harbor hopes for successful change when our previous attempts had been hopeless failures? As the optimists say, may be, I should see the positive side. May be the fact that we keep trying despite failures is a sign of our persistence and resilience, and not a sign of our ludicrous naiveté that  lets us regale in our false hopes.

May be we all are intuitively skeptic about our ability to change, but we still try because that seems to be the right thing to do. Long ago, when I was in the first year of my undergrad, in a long-delayed welcome ceremony for freshmen, my seniors asked me to share my New Year's resolutions. As an earnest young man always eager to im-prove himself, I am sure I had made at least a couple of resolutions that year as well. However, I didn't want to share my resolutions publicly with everyone. So, I gave a tongue-in-cheek reply, "My New Year's resolution is that I won't make New Year's resolutions anymore... they fail anyway." My seniors seemed to like my response, because I got a lot of clapping and cheers.

My reply may have pleased my seniors, or at least amused them, but the earnest man in me has diligently continued his attempts at self-improvement. And I can confidently say that I have improved at least in some spheres of life. I guess that makes me an "improved" man, if not "new and improved." The latter title has traditionally been the reserve of soaps and toothpastes only, though now everyone has become very ambitious. Cellphones, web browsers, tablets, and computers, all become more attractive when the "new and improved" version comes with numerical suffixes of 2.0, 3.0... Some even stall their purchases by a year, because they want nothing less than the "new and improved" version. Of course, these people are much better than those who discard their 2.0 the moment 3.0 hits the market, because our obsession with "new and improved" products can continue indefinitely only if we get an Earth 2.0.

To be continued ...

Meditating on Hollywood

Who said Hollywood is all glamor and materialistic? Hollywood is probably more spiritual than the greatest saints the world ever had. It follows Hindu and Buddhist philosophies to the core. The biggest evidence for this are the Hollywood movies themselves. In Hollywood, stories never end. They just lead to sequels and prequels. That is life in full circle there. Every end becomes a new beginning, and every beginning another end. Then, look at those 'glamorous' actors and actresses who are reborn in every new movie with a different look and personality. If an actor is a tyrannical king in one movie (read life), in the second he may be a timid simpleton, in the third a suave corporate executive, and in the next just a lowly rat or a grasshopper. Often when in the role of an animal or insect, the actor (read soul) does some really great deeds, which wipes out his bad karma from being a tyrant in a previous movie, and he is reborn as a human being again. Of course, there are some actors who just do the same thing over and over again, but that happens in the cosmos of life as well, when some souls do not learn anything from their current births. It is no wonder then that these actors are usually the muscle rippling action stars, who do not see anything beyond their physical prowess.

Anyway, friends, next time you see me watching a movie, know I am not just watching a movie. Instead, I am meditating on the mysteries of life—mysteries which you can only hope to understand through Hollywood. Hollywood is the microcosm of life. It is the microcosm of the entire universe. Oh, but I got to stop here, because it's time for my next round of meditation. There is no point in I just preaching about Hollywood; you have to experience it yourself. You have to meditate, if you do want to get enlightened. Just remember to breathe well while you are meditating. There is no reason for any 'bated breath' here.

Getting rid of Valentine's Day

India is a land of many controversies—love, or more specifically the expression of it, is one of them. Fundamentalist groups of different religions—such as the Ram Sena in Mangalore and Dukhtaran-e-Millat in Jammu & Kashmir—have created a huge hue and cry about the inappropriateness of celebrating Valentine's Day in India.

I didn't care much about Valentine's Day. Frankly, I didn't even know that there existed something called Valentine's Day until the mid 90s when I went to Hyderabad for my Bachelor's degree. Since I was very good with general knowledge (GK) and regularly won prizes in GK competitions at school, I think I'll attribute my childhood ignorance about Valentine's Day to it not being a major part of Indian culture until the 90s. As far as my understanding goes, Valentine's day became popular in India only during the 90s with the onset of cable television and after the Indian economy opened itself up to the outside world. Many people sure must have been celebrating Valentine's day prior to the 90s but I guess it must have been an affair only amongst the urban elite.

The commercialization of love with Valentine's day cards, gifts, roses and red balloons surely turns many people off. The people who are put off includes not just religious fundamentalists like Pramod Muthalik (Sri Ram Sena's chief) and Asiya Andrabi (the leader of Dukhtaran-e-Millat), but also liberal citizens in India and the West. A commercialization that creates pressure on people to gift a dozen roses as if one rose meant less or inferior love, is something that should be deplored. But that does not give anyone the right to be violent with anyone. So when I hear news about religious fundamentalists in India harassing young couples on Valentine's day, I feel violated. I get mad when Asiya Andrabi's group threatened to throw acid on women who celebrate Valentine's day and don't wear burkhas in Kashmir. I get mad when I learn about incidents of Hindu goons going on a street rampage, harassing young couples, and destroying property.

I may not have been much of a Valentine's Day celebrator, but I don't think there is anything immoral with Valentine's Day celebration either; it's after all a festival of love—the same love that is epitomized in the shringar ras of Lord Krishna. Valentine's Day per se may have been alien to India, but the emotion of love is not. For that matter, even the so called dirty word "sex" is part of our rich Indian heritage. We are the land of the kamasutra. I know of no other country and no other religion where places of worship have explicit depiction of sexual positions.

Come on Mr. Muthalik, let's celebrate love. Let's celebrate love making. It is the core of being Indian—after all we did not become over a billion strong just out of thin air. I guess you (and your likes) are not upset with love and sex, but with the Western connection of Valentine's day. Now, that's fine, but don't get violent because of that—by doing so you are only alienating people who would otherwise have been your staunch supporters. For example, I am not in favor of the propagation of the pub culture and would support campaigns that discourage alcohol consumption among youth. However, you and your organization members have pissed me off very badly by, because of attacking and harassing pub goers in Mangalore. In fact, your despicable acts has pissed me so much that I was a Valentine's day enthusiast this year. I distributed chocolates to all my friends whom I met on Valentine's day. Unfortunately, I didn't have my Valentine around me, but if I did I would have painted the whole town red.

Yes, Mr. Muthalik you are succeeding in converting people, but only in the opposite direction of what you intended. By coercing and threatening people with violence, you are only creating a rebellious generation. That is the only reason, you were the recipient of thousands of pink chaddies (panties) this Valentine's day. You may have returned the chaddies with pink sarees, but what would you do if you received soiled and sperm stained chaddies next time?

If you really want to get rid of Valentine's day, why don't you use something more intelligent and less coercive? For a start, you could change the name of Valentine's day to (say) Kishen Kanhaiya Day—after all changing Western names to Indian ones has been the core responsibility for Indian politicians in the last decade. If Victoria Terminal could become Chatrapati Shivaji Terminal, why cannot Valentine's Day become Kishen Kanhaiya Day? You may not be a politician, but you could campaign for such name changes, and politicians would be happy to oblige. And you know what, you could spend your supporters' money in collaborating with an advertising agency that will make the Krishna's color of blue as hip as red. For all you know, Pepsi may sponsor your campaign for a blue makeover of Valentine's day and you won't have to depend on street ruffians to collect money for you. Now don't think I'm just making fun of you (and the Indian politcians) by giving such bizarre suggestions—of course, I am making fun of all of you, but there is a note of seriousness in it as well. You can change people only through persuasion, not through coercion. Even the bizarrest and and seemingly stupid attempts of persuasion are better than acts of coercion, harassment or violence.