• Home
• /
• Opinion

Love should be a unifying force that heals

Whether in romantic liaisons, friendships or within families, love can never be enjoined on anyone.

Is human history filled with more stories of love forsaken than love found? If the endearing lines of Rumi - "a thousand half-loves must be forsaken to take one whole heart home" - is anything to go by, tales of unrequited love probably surpass those with happy endings. History, mythology, literature and arts abound with instances of one-sided love that have given us stirring songs of pining and dreadful stories of spite. From the myth of Daphne's rejection of Apollo's fervent love in Greek mythology to Surpanaka's much fabled tale of rejection by Rama in Ramayana to Eponine, who became the guardian angel of heartbroken girls after Victor Hugo portrayed her with such delicate despondency in Les Miserables to Infosys employee Swati's fate in Chennai, the tragedy of one-sided love has assumed many forms through the centuries.
Love and its attendant emotions have resulted in the most piteous to the calamitous outcomes that have cost lives, sometimes as collaterals of conflicts and sometimes as individual incidents of revenge. But for love denied, the Trojan War would not have been fought nor will have yet another young woman been slaughtered in broad daylight in Chennai last week. Love, with all its inherent charms, now seems to be the most insidious of all human sentiments, trumping even jealousy and greed.
Dealing effectively with rejection is a task that behooves the saintly and not us lesser mortals who are slaves to attachment and are thirsting for acceptance. Our lives hinge on strange penchants and fondness for people, places and things that we cannot easily give up, and possessing those objects of love becomes our prime motive in life. In layman's parlance that would translate to, 'making that which is not rightfully ours, ours." It is this hankering, for things we consider are our privileges, which often leads to eventualities that are now happening with alarming regularity. Especially with regard to matters of the heart, 'for heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned.'
From time immemorial, learned men have stressed the necessity of achieving dispassion as an indispensable virtue for our spiritual evolution. Be that as it may, the difficulty of letting go things that we are so smitten with is a reality that will plague us constantly; at least till we remain yoked to the worldly appeals. But surely, we cannot let those maverick obsessions take heinous forms and make Godzillas out of us? Can deficient love, romantic or otherwise, make us synonyms of hatred and brutality? That it can, is the shocking reality of new times. Gone are the days when dismissal by a keenly pursued love interest is drowned in torrential tears, love ballads and unkempt appearances. That spurned love now produces stalkers and slaughterers out of ordinary people is not only chilling, but it contorts the very character of the most essential human emotion - that of being a unifying force that also heals.
From being a passing phase of disillusionment, jilted love, especially among young people, has become a serious prompt for crime. Acid attacks, rapes and murders are becoming more commonplace, and saying 'no' to a suitor is no longer a matter of just breaking up and moving on. Love has become difficult and unpredictable these days - inconsistent in its tenor and wrongly interpreted for most part. Slighted and let down, the young are finding villainous ways to give their love some ill-conceived validity.
Whether in romantic liaisons, friendships or within families, love can never be enjoined on anyone. Love isn't the first unbridled flush of passion that one feels in the sinews or a remorseless invasion of the other's emotional space by force. For love of the most elegant kind to happen, providence must grace. Love cannot be induced, as all those who have loved will acknowledge, and what right do we have to claim allegiance from anyone who hasn't been swept by the same winds of affection as us? We cannot hijack someone's heart. Hearts have to surrender on their own and when affections don't come our way, from quarters we expect, life must pick itself up and chart a new course.
But then, who can prevail upon those seized by blinding emotions and convince them that love by itself doesn't expect reciprocation? That it thrives on its own, nourished by one's heart, sans recompense - like our love for rain and rainbow, hills and valleys, fireflies and dandelions. How amusing that we love these natural wonders without any claim for love in return, but aren't so charitable with fellow human beings!
- Asha Iyer Kumar is a Dubai-based writer

Tweetspiration