Skip to main content

Love’s Travails


Love is the capacity to put yourself in the shoes of the other person.  Sex has little to do with it.  Psychological researches have shown that lust is associated with motivation / reward areas of the brain, while love activates the regions connected to caring and empathy.

Source: Here
Those who care for others more than for themselves as Mother Teresa did, for example, are the ideal ‘lovers’.  She cared for the persons who had no one to rely on when they needed help the most.  She cleaned the filthiest of human bodies and applied the balm of tenderness on their festering wounds and lesions.  Hers was a sincere interest in people as people.  Not as vote banks.  Not even as potential converts, as alleged by some, though her love did convert a lot of people into better human beings.  Genuine love is transformative.

Genuine love changes people.  Into better human beings. 

Not many are capable of such love, however.  But there are a lot of social activists who have given themselves selflessly to certain humanitarian causes.  That selfless giving is love.

Contrast that love with what gau rakshaks and such right wing activists are doing now.  They are motivated by hatred and vindictiveness.  Some of them are prompted by sheer profit motive.  They are extortionists wearing the garb of religion.

Genuine love can never be violent at any cost, whatever the cause one is championing.  Love is empathy, psychology tells us.  Cruelty and violence have no place in it. No one can play with cruelty without losing his/her sensitivity of mind, as Dag Hammarskjold said. 

Those who love cows will look after cows and not attack people who live on their products.  Those who love their gods will perceive those gods in their fellow human beings as Mother Teresa did.  Yes, for Mother Teresa, people were images of her god, Jesus.  To that extent, her love was conditional.  She loved people because they were the living images of her god.  And make no mistake, there is no unconditional love in the world of human beings.  All love is conditional and limited by many factors simply because that’s all what we, human beings, are capable of.  But such conditional love is infinite times better than the hatred or the extortionist motives that drive today’s guardians of morality, religion, gods and cultural nationalism.


PS. Written for Indispire Edition 130


Indian Bloggers


Comments

  1. Mother was without an iota of doubt a saintly person, leaving her poor European country under dictatorship and coming down to our city of joy to care for the poor.
    But there was no real need to ensure that the cared for persons align with her religious belief.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Did she convert? I wrote about it some time back:

      https://matheikal.wordpress.com/2010/08/25/mother-teresa-and-religious-conversion/

      Delete
  2. Conditional love or selfish love ? Oh but if love is conditional then but obvious those conditions are set for selfish reasons to begin with.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, there's no difference between conditional love and selfish love. Human love is limited and I have no knowledge about any other kind of love ☺

      Delete
  3. Selfish love will seek happiness only for your own self....but love that is true, even if it is conditional, will try to ensure happiness of others.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. That's a fine distinction you make between selfish love and conditional love and I won't dispute it. But what I meant by selfishness was the quest for self-fulfilment. For Mother Teresa, to use the same example, her love of the poor and the abandoned was actually her way of finding self-fulfilment and to that extent it was selfish. I know I'm taking it to a different level. However, that clarification is necessary.

      Delete
    2. You seem to take it to Rand's definition of selfishness. But, out of topic, is there any reason for you to not like her works?

      Delete
    3. I read Rand when I was in my twenties and fell in love with her. I was an idealistic dreamer then. Rand's worldview is idealistic. Rejecting the excesses of socialism, she embraced the extremes of capitalist individualism whose selfishness, when put into practicality, is what we see today: cutthroat competitiveness. Her idealism borders on the religious paradise, an earthly utopia, an impossibility.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...