ON LOVE
Remo Fernandes in The Week, India.

Ah, "love". It's got to be the most misunderstood and exploited word in the world after "god". I wonder what my teenage sons really mean when they say "I love you" to their girlfriends. I still don't know exactly what I mean when I say them to my woman.

Three little inoffensive sounding words. Do they mean "I am yours, you are mine, I own you and you me, now don't you dare even look at another"? Do they mean "I've married you, and I've put up with you all these years and made children with you, haven't I, so I suppose that means I love you"? Do they mean "Well you're the man my parents chose for me, and they know what's best for me, and I've never even really seen a man before I married you, so of course I must love you, whatever that means"?

Or do they mean "I love you as you are, I love what you are, and not what I might want you to be, not what you're not or cannot be, I love you without possession and obsession, without needing to put you in a cage or in a mould or on a leash, I love you simply"?

The last kind of love is what the Bhagwad Gita teaches us is the highest form of love. Universal and personal all at once. Without the expectations of returns in any form. How many of us are truly capable of it? How many of us even attempt it?

When we say "I love you," most of us at best mean, "I'm in love with you, I desire you, and I cannot live without you."

Ah, romance and sex… now that's another kettle of fish altogether. The pleasurable trouble-makers. The greatest catalysts for the insincere utterance of the words "I love you" ever since the world began. And in a society like ours, which has always felt guilty about sex without marriage or at least love, women in particular often need to insist of a man "But do you really love me?" before giving themselves to him, often in order to blind themselves to the fact that they are probably acting out of pure lust and nothing else. Men, of course, are usually scared as hell to utter the three death sentences, because here they are tantamount to a stamped proposal of marriage. But what the heck, if that's the only way to get it, they get it, and then run like hell—or end up with a wife.

People tend to think that artists need more love [both the permissible and the forbidden kinds] than any one else. That's a whole lot of hogwash. Everybody needs love. It's just that artists tend to look at the world and at life in a more unconventional way, are more prone to swimming against society's tide in order to live according to their own beliefs, and have "private" lives which belong in the public domain. The common man would gladly follow suit given half a chance, but since he usually doesn't dare, he finds it safer to live out his fantasies through the artists. That's why the hungry, starving demand for starry gossip columns. Ah, lucky artists. And I'm not talking Bollywood here. I'm talking real artists, from Khalil Gibran to Jim Morrison.

Like everything else, the sexual revolution in India started too late. Or was it too early? We have literary works and sculpture which stand silent witness to the fact that we perfected love and sex to a divine art form centuries ago—until the western missionary came and told us we were sinful and made us feel ashamed of who we were. Now we call ourselves chaste and the West depraved. If we insist on holding on to our traditional values, if we believe ours are higher than the "foreign" ones, we must teach our young the lessons of the Kama Sutra and Khajuraho—or else openly admit that we embrace the teachings of the missionaries and renounce our own. Will we make up our minds and stop this confused lost-in-both-worlds hypocrisy someday?

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