The Way We Love

"Life is the flower for which love is the honey" (Victor Hugo). But how many of us are savouring the honey of love in our life? Very few. In our society, love is a forbidden subject so much so that even the term 'love' is frowned upon as if it is a destructible element of human nature. We have undermined love to the extent that we have now reduced it to the sheer level of venery. It is conspicuous to the lovers to a great extent how loathsomely love is treated in our society. If a survey was conducted on the issue of love, I am sure (and you might be too) that 95% people would not hold love in a good esteem. Actually the fact is we are entangled in the barriers of a society which sees love as a threat to the preservation of its culture and religion. I am not well cognizant of the other places in the world, but in our society to love is to battle with the innumerable strictures imposed upon us by religion and the society itself. In order to love here, one has to rebel against the society and its regressive norms that stand like a high wall in front of the lovers and for this very reason perhaps most people are afraid of loving, even though they harbour in the core of their heart a desperate desire for love.

Love is forbidden everywhere. Even within the four walls of our home it is gruesomely interdicted. How many parents do encourage their children to love? How many of them indoctrinate their children the significance of love in life? Almost none. Even if the absence of love in their marriage have turned them into mere living corpses howling for happiness and tranquility, they are reluctant to foster their children to love. Instead they discourage them as much as they can to value love in life on the gratuitous pretext that love could lead one into perversity. It is a gimmickry, even more cunning than the ones the politicians play, to disinterest the children to love so that the parents can secure their image in the society where lovers are looked upon as being against the prevalent culture and religion. Thus the sapling of love in our society dies under the suppression of the parents' conscious management of their social image. Parents want their sons and daughters to be happy in married life and in turn in life itself, but how can they be happy if there is no love in it? Arranged-marriage, as it is called here, is the best form of marriage that parents are bound to argue in fear of scoietal backlash; besides it gives them the allowance to dictate over their son's or daughter's life. They are the happiest to be able to choose a mate for their son or daughter and make him or her love the person chosen by them. Is it possible to love someone out of compulsion, out of respect for an authority? I do not think so. Society confers upon the parents the authority of being god-like personalities to their children and in this way, there remains no human relationships between parents and their offsprings- their relationship becomes tantamount to that of God and his devotees. Under the dominance of this kind of relationship between parents and children, love between them turns into forceful devotion. Out of this reverence, the son/daughter has to sacrifice his/her personal feeling especially in the case of marriage in order to please his/her parents' wish. I wish every parents in our society had read Khalil Gibran's poetic-essay Children which would have provided them with the right understanding of the sigificance of their children's life in this world: "Your children are not your children./ They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself./They come through you but not from you,/ And though they are with you yet they belong not to you." Nowadays the trend has been reformed in keeping with modernity: love is now allowed to roam about within the compass of same religion and same caste which is however nothing but an extension of the compulsion we notice in the case of arranged-marriage. Just as love is restricted to the parents' choices in case of arranged-marriage, now love is also constricted to the confinement of religion and caste in love-marriages. The condition still remains the same- love someone approved by your parents or family whose approval is extensively moulded by the societal and religious norms that contradict the idea of love. It is not that disrespect to parents is being endorsed here, it is definitely not; but their manipulative way of suppressing love in their sons'/daughters' life is needed to put under the scanner. The suppression of their children's rights and the preservation of their social image some times turn them into werewolves by propelling them to commit the killing of their own son and daughter in the name of saving the honour of their family. Even in this 21st century in which human civilization is thriving at a tremendous pace in every fields, we are stuck in the pristine norms of religion that even make us kill our own children on account of loving. Even today young lovers find themselves having to flee their homes to be true to their love and afterwards are chased down by parents brandishing sharpened swords of caste and religion. The lovers are murdered by the assassins deployed by the parents of their beloved. Will it not be possible ever to love without rebelling in India? Will we not ever be able to dignify love over the inhumane primitive customs of religion and caste for the sake of humanity?

The irony of religion is that it claims to stand for peace and love but it is unable to turn its flag-bearers into lovers. We worship Gods and Goddesses like Ram-Sita, Shiv-Parvati, Radha-Krishna and celebrate their love-stories but we are unwilling to inculcate ourselves with the idea of love their life represents. The word 'Islam' means peace, but how can a religion be peaceful with so much restriction on love? Primordial customs have eclipsed the true spirit of religion and imbibed humanity out of it turning it into a fierce beast thirsty of  blood. Dogmatic in nature, we keep worshipping this beast and following its nonsensical rubrics paying no heed to rationality. Backed by societal norms, religion inflicts restriction to human-relations and condemns us to a lifetime of fear and hesitance. In poetry or songs, we may sing about taking wings like birds, but the truth is we continue to be trapped in the cage of religion all our life - religion that is devoid of rationality and logic; religion that divides us and teaches us simultaneously to be apathetic towards people belonging to other classes and creeds. Thanks to our religious dogmatism and our belief in extreme form of irrational religious customs, a new term "Love-Jihad" has come into being. The term has reasonably gained political significane in the ongoing political atmosphere of  polarisation in our country. People are being fooled by this political agenda which has been unnecessarily bestowed upon a deep religious connotation by a certain political party. The very idea of "love jihad" can only stem from hyper-masculine minds that are intrinsicly reluctant to recognize women as equal to men and who never pain themselves to learn how to love someone. Blind-folded by irrational religious beliefs, we, the people, also let our conscience overlook their audacity to brand the women as incapable of using their brain in taking decisions in their life. Thus, the religion proclaiming to be an entity of love and peace is ironically being used as a deterrent force in the way of love itself in our society.    

Love is rooted in respect, mutual understanding and egalitarianistic beliefs. Therefore, hyper masculinity, ubiquitous in this society, is one of the sole threats to love. It is woven in the fabric of our society. From their birth, a male child is programmed to become a flag-bearer of masculinity and on the other hand a female child to worship this masculinity with utmost reverence. It is a normalcy that has been in existence since the beginning of this world, I suppose. Most of the male in this society consider love as a way of fulfilling their necessities in life- to quench their libido, breed their offsprings, look after them and take care of their households. Women are loved by men only to restrict them within the role determined by this male-dominated society. Love, even if attainable somewhere down the line, is used as a tool to enslave women. Hence love no longer remains love but becomes enslavement for most women who dare to question this hyper masculinity and a matter of compromise for those who are accustomed to living caged-life. It happens with most of the women in our society irrespective of religion and caste; therefore, the argument of  "love jihad" is nothing but an insubstantial one. There is no denying that misogynistic and masculine thinking is extremely immune to love and the overall mentality of our society, even including that of a large section of women, is sadly a hyper misogynistic and masculine one. Owing to this sole reason, we also gruesomely look down upon love in similar gender. In this case, we are prone to put forth our illogical, hackneyed argument indicating "natural way of love" without having proper knowledge of the magnificence of the way of nature. In addition, this masculine society is so sexually supressive that we scarcely bat an eye when hatred is spread out publically and bluntly among us on the basis of religion, caste, gender, political beliefs and so on but we get immesely charged up in menifesting our abhorrence against the couples kissing, caressing and loving each other at public park or cinema hall. Hence, to sum up all the feellings of love in the mind of this masculine society, it can be precisely said that love to us is but a greed of authority to enslave women and a way of satiating our extreme sexual urge covered in the disguise of the 'illusion' of love we get to see in Bollywood films.

~Imran