Skip to main content

True Love


Rama consigned Sita to the flames.  Krishna made many husbands cuckolds.  And they are our gods.  Their love ought to be true love.  Really?

Helen and Paris loved each other and started a war which killed thousands of people.  Was that true love?

Antony loved Cleopatra to such an extent that they died for each other, killing many in the process.

Jesus Christ loved mankind so much that he let himself be crucified and then went on to be worshipped as a god.  True love?

The Buddha was not much of a lover, I think.  He was too indifferent.  But if we were to live with him, we would have found him the ideal human being, almost a god.  Indifferent.  But never judgemental.  Eccentric and yet the most sane.  True love?

Mother Teresa loved everybody because she saw the face of Jesus in everybody.  She loved Jesus.  Not Tom, Syed or Hari.  Was that true love?

Mahatma Gandhi loved his principles more than his wife or children.  True love?

I love Mr Narendra Modi because there is no connection between what he says and what he does.  I think that is true love. In today’s world.


PS. Written for the latest Indispire theme.
Labels:

Comments

  1. Roohi BhatnagarOctober 31, 2015 at 6:54 PM

    There is only one true love: love of Self :) Even parents love their offspring because they are a manifestation of their ego. No?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 1, 2015 at 9:29 AM

      If people really loved themselves they would love others too. ?

      Delete
  2. UnknownNovember 1, 2015 at 2:58 PM

    All it has to do with True love is the Feel-Good factor. Love is the purest way to feel about someone. The more you do, the merrier is your adaptability of true love :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 1, 2015 at 3:29 PM

      Of course. All human love is limited and conditional. Even divine love is, apparently. Feel-good, yeah, I guess that's it.

      Delete
  3. sunaina sharmaNovember 1, 2015 at 5:38 PM

    Being a subjective emotion, love is bound by its own limitations. For Buddha, don't you think being indifferent is a wrong word? Unaffected yes, indifferent, I don't think so.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 1, 2015 at 6:05 PM

      If we take indifference positively, the way Buddha took it, the word is good, I think. Indifference is more profound than unaffectedness.

      Delete
  4. Sunshine-struckNovember 2, 2015 at 12:37 PM

    "Rama consigned Sita to the flames. Krishna made many husbands cuckolds. And they are our gods. Their love ought to be true love. Really?"

    There is clear explanation as to why Rama and Krishna behaved the way they did.
    Rama wanted to show it to the world that Sita was "untouched",but, he knew Sita was untouched.

    Krishna had to grant the wishes of the Gopika Stree(s) to be their husband. Krishna, by instinct and definition, has won and surpassed anything that is humanly, including 'Kama' so, he is not bound by any women or desires.

    This is the right way to interpret, according to our scriptures.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 2, 2015 at 5:37 PM

      Is there any one particularly right way of interpreting any discourse?

      Delete
    2. Sunshine-struckNovember 2, 2015 at 7:33 PM

      I don't know what to say! You always amaze me with your way of thinking. That's it.

      That's in a positive sense.

      Delete
    3. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 2, 2015 at 8:36 PM

      The simple truth is that I get into a lot of problems because of my thinking and I don't like it. But I can't help myself!

      Delete
  5. MoonNovember 2, 2015 at 12:44 PM

    This is a very critical question, sir. Love is a pure emotion and a feeling which have various manifestations. If there is 'love' it has to be 'true'. Those who are in love don't think about the consequence or the outcome. It's upon us how we look at it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 2, 2015 at 5:40 PM

      Agreed. All that i'm saying is love has its limits, limitations and "manifestations" (to use your word). We have to accept that if our love is to be practical and not just an idealistic dream.

      Delete
  6. UnknownNovember 2, 2015 at 2:41 PM

    Love comes in different forms and is defined in different ways, by the people who are in love. It is only the person who actually feels can describe what it is. Others can also make guesses :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 2, 2015 at 5:48 PM

      Experience. That's what love really is. Words matter little. Most of the people mentioned in the post are people who had genuine love for others. I'm interested in the essential limitedness of human love. Even gods will arrive at points of despair in their loves. I' m fascinated by a god who can cry out, "my god, my god, why have you forsaken me?" (Jesus)

      Delete
  7. Anita SabatNovember 3, 2015 at 5:29 PM

    So many instances of love. But, love means different things to different people...
    They say 'love is blind' :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalNovember 3, 2015 at 7:14 PM

      At a certain period in life, love is blind. After that the eyes open :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pranita a perverted genius

Bulldozer begins its work at Sawan Pranita was a perverted genius. She had Machiavelli’s brain, Octavian’s relentlessness, and Levin’s intellectual calibre. She could have worked wonders if she wanted. She could have created a beautiful world around her. She had the potential. Yet she chose to be a ruthless exterminator. She came to Sawan Public School just to kill it. A religious cult called Radha Soami Satsang Beas [RSSB] had taken over the school from its owner who had never visited the school for over 20 years. This owner, a prominent entrepreneur with a gargantuan ego, had come to the conclusion that the morality of the school’s staff was deviating from the wavelengths determined by him. Moreover, his one foot was inching towards the grave. I was also told that there were some domestic noises which were grating against his patriarchal sensibilities. One holy solution for all these was to hand over the school and its enormous campus (nearly 20 acres of land on the outskirts
12 comments
Read more

Machiavelli the Reverend

Let us go today , you and I, through certain miasmic streets. Nothing will be quite clear along our way because this journey is through some delusions and illusions. You will meet people wearing holy robes and talking about morality and virtues. Some of them will claim to be god’s men and some will make taller claims. Some of them are just amorphous. Invisible. But omnipotent. You can feel their power around you. On you. Oppressing you. Stifling you. Reverend Machiavelli is one such oppressive power. You will meet Franz Kafka somewhere along the way. Joseph K’s ghost will pass by. Remember Joseph K who was arrested one fine morning for a crime that nobody knew anything about? Neither Joseph nor the men who arrest him know why Joseph K is arrested. The power that keeps Joseph K under arrest is invisible. He cannot get answers to his valid questions from the visible agents of that power. He cannot explain himself to that power. Finally, he is taken to a quarry outside the town wher
19 comments
Read more

Levin the good shepherd

AI-generated image The lost sheep and its redeemer form a pet motif in Christianity. Jesus portrayed himself as a good shepherd many times. He said that the good shepherd will leave his 99 sheep in order to bring the lost sheep back to the fold. When he finds the lost sheep, the shepherd is happier about that one sheep than about the 99, Jesus claimed. He was speaking metaphorically. The lost sheep is the sinner in Jesus’ parable. Sin is a departure from the ‘right’ way. Angels raise a toast in heaven whenever a sinner returns to the ‘right’ path [Luke 15:10]. A lot of Catholic priests I know carry some sort of a Redeemer complex in their souls. They love the sinner so much that they cannot rest until they make the angels of God run for their cups of joy. I have also been fortunate to have one such priest-friend whom I shall call Levin in this post. He has befriended me right from the year 1976 when I was a blundering adolescent and he was just one year older than me. He possesse
8 comments
Read more

Nakulan the Outcast

Nakulan was one of the many tenants of Hevendrea . A professor in the botany department of the North Eastern Hill University, he was a very lovable person. Some sense of inferiority complex that came from his caste status made him scoff the very idea of his lovability. He lived with his wife and three children in one of Heavendrea’s many cottages. When he wanted to have a drink, he would walk over to my hut. We sipped our whiskies and discussed Shillong’s intriguing politics or something of the sort while my cassette player crooned gently in the background. Nakulan was more than ten years my senior by age. He taught a subject which had never aroused my interest at any stage of my life. It made no difference to me whether a leaf was pinnately compound or palmately compound. You don’t need to know about anther and stigma in order to understand a flower. My friend Levin would have ascribed my lack of interest in Nakulan’s subject to my egomania. I always thought that Nakulan lived
15 comments
Read more

Queen of Religion

She looked like Queen Victoria in the latter’s youth but with a snow-white head. She was slim, fair and graceful. She always smiled but the smile had no life. Someone on the campus described it as a “plastic smile.” She was charming by physical appearance. Soon all of us on the Sawan school campus would realise how deceptive appearances were. Queen took over the administration of Sawan school on behalf of her religious cult RSSB [Radha Soami Satsang Beas]. A lot was said about RSSB in the previous post. Its godman Gurinder Singh Dhillon is now 70 years old. I don’t know whether age has mellowed his lust for land and wealth. Even at the age of 64, he was embroiled in a financial scam that led to the fall of two colossal business enterprises, Fortis Healthcare and Religare finance. That was just a couple of years after he had succeeded in making Sawan school vanish without a trace from Delhi which he did for the sake of adding the school’s twenty-odd acres of land to his existing hun
10 comments
Read more