Love that I knew and love that I want... in my singleness....

It was then, when I heard that my parents (Bengali-Hindu mother and Nepali-Christian father) had a love marriage, i realized that there is something called LOVE. My parents love story was like the Hindi film Ek Duje Ke Liye. This movie was about the love between a Tamil man, Vasu (played by Kamal Hasan), and a North Indian woman, Sapna (Played by Rati Agnihotri), who are neighbours in Goa. They come from totally different backgrounds and can hardly speak the other's language. When Vasu and Sapna admit their love, there is chaos in their homes, and their parents reject the idea. Same sort of matter happened in my parent's family too. But all those odd they could overcome and now they live happily ever after. They could do that because their love for each other (till date) is so strong (or so deep). After more than two decades, when suddenly my sister decided to marry a Tamil man from Chennai, I could again see the strong connection of LOVE. Love between them brought two families (culturally and linguistically different) closer to understand the respective culture with huge amount of tolerance and acceptance. Hence I always felt that I will also experience such love in my life. From them, I learnt that Love is one of the most profound emotions that they experience as humans. It’s impact is huge in human life. Though we can invite it into our lives but we do not have the control over the how, when and where love starts to express itself. Maybe that’s why 72% of people believe in love at first sight. Sometimes, love truly does strike like a bolt of lightening to the chest, and you aren’t prepared for it. It happened for me once for someone, but alas! it was just from my side and I had exhaust myself to the extreme to decide my love to let go. But in case of my parents and my sister and her husband, love was at first sight from both end and that made their life beautiful. May be for them, definition of love was not difficult as they got their tune and lyrics in harmony. But for many people who could not find love or if love is one sided traffic, then the definition of love is different for both of them. And when the love is defined in two different ways then there is pain and suffering which is huge. This pain takes away the peace of mind and make you mad, vulnerable, sad, angry as well as depressed. Here I would like to state that the difference between lust and love. Lust is a temporary desire which is fired by an increased release of testosterone and estrogen–it lasts for a little bit, then you normalize and it’s gone. But, when you feel true love, the brain can release a whole set of chemicals, allowing you to experience it in different expressions. Love can be blind, misguided, tragic, unconditional, steadfast and inconsistent. It takes on many different variants, yet, at its best, love is a passionate commitment that we constantly work to develop and nurture. When you break down and analyze different relationships, one of the key factors is how compatible two partners are, so love is compatibility. When you share the same values, likes and dislikes, interests, political or philosophical views with someone you are much more likely to be compatible and thus, are more likely to fall in love. Sure, there can always be situations where "opposites attract" (it happened with me) but there will always need to be some common grounds for the relationship to grow roots on, or it might fall into one of the other categories of love. Love and compatibility work together to build a relationship, so at the end of the day, you want to find someone you know you know you are going to be compatible with. 

But when I did not get love till the age of 40, like my parents and my sister and her husband, I started questioning myself as - What is Love? For me, at the end Tagore's Bengali song - Sokhi Bhavan kahare bole (what do you mean by 'thought', my dear - English translation below is by Anjan Ganguly) helped me survive without love till date. The songs narrates in the following way - 

What do you mean by 'Thought', my dear.
What do you mean by 'Pain' either.
What is that you yell 'Love' for,
What the word 'Love' means,
Is it saturated with pain?
Is that synonymous with tears or sigh of sufferings?
It is surely a wonder, why it fascinates people.
To my eyes everything is pleasing.
All are youthful, all are free from filth.
Blue sky, green parks, elaborate moonlight, tender blossoms –
All alike myself.
They laugh and sing all the time,
Face certain death delightfully smiling.
They know not sobs, neither fascinated to pains.
Flowers fall apart giggling, moonlight vanish while smiling,
Stars in the sky go out of vision in the ocean of light.
Who is happier than me –
Come O Darling, sooth your ears
With the blissful songs of a happy person.
You should be able to smile for a while amid routine sufferings.
Let us all sing for a single day ignoring the melancholy.

I always dream (hope) to be loved by and to love 'someone' from my deepest corner of my heart but as the time passes by, I feel that the hope is becoming impossible and I am leading towards hopelessness in finding love. Staying alone is possible and I can stay alone. Its not a problem but living without a love is something really painful. Love for me is someone who will emotionally and physically (together and not separately) care me from the heart. One of the pressing questions I hear overtly and covertly from every near and dear ones of mines is "Who am I with?" My parents, sister and friends supported me fully in my life, except in this one aspect, my singleness. We all talk about singles, loneliness, but we don't talk about what it's like to live without partner while longing for one over years and then decades. Very few of my close friends know that how much I long to have a partner in my life just like the one my parents have found among them, my sister and her husband have found between them. Its the Bollywood, Hindi films that have created my perception about love and having partners in one's life. It is also our religion, our society that have inculcated the belief, deep into my heart, in romantic love. How many Hindi and Bengali film songs that I have heard (from childhood to till date) revolve around the long search and eventually discover the beloved through the process of love at first sight. The phrases at the end of all Hindi and Bengali movie (of 80s and 90s that I watched), "happily ever after" made us strongly believe that two lives are made better by virtue of their union. Hence from my teenage I am looking for that holy union to live my life "happily ever after". 

Reference - 

- http://www.geetabitan.com/lyrics/rs-s/sokhi-bhabona-kaahare-english-translation.html)

Made in Heaven... to live in hell... what an irony?

Made in Heaven... to live in hell... what an irony? 

Made in Heaven, the web series in Amazon prime video could really reflect the hypocrisy of Indian society there on your face directly.  As an Indian, it made me ask a critical question as to what will it take for our society to move from hypocrisy to genuineness. Indian society is very harsh to the marginalised section of our society always and the series could rightly show it there on the face for us to reflect and understand the need to change. 

The protagonists in the series rightly showed the struggle for acceptance and belonging that each one of us has while traversing the path of personal and professional life. The struggle of certain marginalised people in an urban setting in a globalised world is constantly increasing in the line of gender, class and sexual orientation. These struggles will definitely shape the social, economic and political narrative of new India in the near future. The series very beautifully showcase the gender wars, class wars, and wars fought to legitimise sexual identity. The idea of using an Indian wedding (elite wedding), which is one of the important parts of Indian life, is used as the medium to narrate these struggles is really unique. If you need to see the hypocritical as well as a genuine part of the Indian family, then I think an Indian wedding is a right platform to observe and reflect. The series with its 9 episodes showed the hypocrisy and genuine outlook of Indian mentality very well. Made in Heaven exposes our "vulgar obsession with social perceptions, our all-consuming desire to be seen as belonging in an exclusive bracket, our raging need for upward social mobility". The series also showed the growing inequality in wealth among Indian society and the impact on the life of each one of us. The series also touched our constant inner struggle between our so-called traditional values and the liberal life that we want to live. "Tara Khanna, who’s had a less-than middle-class upbringing, is in a constant struggle to blend in a wealthy household and the high society, for Jaspreet the struggle is to fit into the mould of a work environment that’s far removed from her reality. For Karan, it’s acceptance, not just from family, but from society, while for Adil and Fayza, who inhabit the top column of the economic food chain, it’s the quest to find mental peace - they are both financially well-off but immensely lonely."

The series tackles very well the important aspect of our struggle "elitism, sexual abuse, toxic masculinity, celebrity entitlement, infidelity, the broken marriage, closeted existence",  with great sensitivity and understanding.  

While watching the series, I could feel constant pain in my heart, a subtle sadness through out. Though the show was about marriages, a happy occasion, there are rarely any happy weddings in it, except one, where a couple in their 60s get married. Rest all marriages were a naked showcase of patriarchal norms. In fact, the series name, Made in Heaven, was full of sarcasm on the idea of marriage - an age-old construct dictated entirely by patriarchal norms and one where women are at the receiving end of sexist ideas perpetuated by seemingly “woke” and “progressive” families.

I feel the series is a brilliant showcase of the damage caused to our Indian society (and the world at large) due to strong patriarchal sentiments that govern our socialisation process. The series interestingly portray men as both, perpetrators as well as victims of patriarchy, especially Vinay Pathak’s Gupta ji, who has one of the show’s most understated yet powerful track. Besides this, the series also reveals the age-old plot of how sexually impotency of men ends up directing their rage towards the women. The series blatantly points out the horrific ways in which women are conditioned to appease to male entitlement and the cost of rebellion if any. While watching those episodes I always had that frustrating moment when I hopelessly feel that will the world change or will the manifestation of patriarchy change with time. The voice over of Shashank Arora at end of every episode was chilling as it could summarise the moral of each episode. They were really reflective and the literal summary of every episode. 

Tanul Thakur, in his article at The Wire, rightly says that it "sees the world from a tower so tall that the rest of the world shrinks dot-like, magnifying the hypocrisies, prejudice and retrograde mindsets of the affluent." 

I find that the Indians need to be educated not just literate. Education in India could not liberate us. It just made us literate to earn money and not a spine to ask a critical question to our traditions, values, customs, beliefs, rituals, socialisation process, prejudice, biasedness, stereotypes and our mindsets. 

Reference: 

 1. https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/made-in-heaven-review-zoya-akhtars-show-exposes-our-vulgar-obsession-with-social-perceptions_in_5c81327ae4b06ff26ba665a7