Just last post I wrote about the speed with which ideas penetrate through the net and now I find myself affected by the phenomenon. Reading Shubham’s blog on love I got a rush of ideas on my own concepts of love.
I have never believed in the concept of love-at-first-site. In my opinion love is an expression of emotional addiction to anything. We love our parents, our brothers, sisters, and even cars, bikes and cities and towns. We get used to anything with which we spend considerable amount of time and somehow develop affection towards it.
At first site we usually get attracted towards people (or for that matter objects like bikes) mainly due to one of the many attractive features in them. But love is not just appreciating these positive features. It goes much beyond infatuation; love means accepting your loved one along with the negative and positive points in it/him/her. I know some negative points about my mother, yet I love her – beyond expression. Same goes with my affection for my father or my brother. And same goes about my affection to my dear birthplace Bhopal.
This brings me to the peculiar relationship of love with cities I have lived in. I like Bhopal and I love it. But since my childhood I never liked Bhilai, I found it lousy and droopy city. Bhopal being a city of hills and lakes I was quite used to adventure and picnics – there are numerous adventure spots in and around Bhopal. Bhilai on the other hand is quite bland; its life is as plain as the roads there. Yet when I was leaving the city after spending 4 years of my engineering there, I felt bad – somewhere in my heart I had started loving the city; while I still disliked it. The same is happening with me in Mumbai. As I have already written in a previous post, I never liked it, never wanted to live here. But now that I have spent round about 1.5 years here I have come to love it. I still dislike then traffic and distances here, but there are memories which I identify with.
There can be no better examples of love and like being different. Bhopal is the city I love and like; but the other two are the ones I love but don’t like – testifying that one tends to love what he associates with for a long time – accepting even what you disliked in the first place.
I am hence a strong believer in the Indian philosophy of tolerance in relationships – whether its marriage or otherwise. If you are (by virtue of customs as it may be) forced to stay together you usually overcome any discontinuities and disagreements that arise. And so in my opinion the perfect pair is not the one which gels together well (there probably is no such pair I guess) but the one which can stay together.
I am now wondering whether I will ever want to spend my life with a partner . . . well no plans as of now ... but you never know whats coming your way . . . . . . . . . . . .