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

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

Abdullah’s Religion

O Abdulla Renowned Malayalam movie actor Mohanlal recently offered special prayers for Mammootty, another equally renowned actor of Kerala. The ritual was performed at Sabarimala temple, one of the supreme Hindu pilgrimage centres in Kerala. No one in Kerala found anything wrong in Mohanlal, a Hindu, praying for Mammootty, a Muslim, to a Hindu deity. Malayalis were concerned about Mammootty’s wellbeing and were relieved to know that the actor wasn’t suffering from anything as serious as it appeared. Except O Abdulla. Who is this Abdulla? I had never heard of him until he created an unsavoury controversy about a Hindu praying for a Muslim. This man’s Facebook profile describes him as: “Former Professor Islahiaya, Media Critic, Ex-Interpreter of Indian Ambassador, Founder Member MADHYAMAM.” He has 108K followers on FB. As I was reading Malayalam weekly this morning, I came to know that this Abdulla is a former member of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind Kerala , a fundamentalist organisation. ...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Empuraan and Ramayana

Maggie and I will be watching the Malayalam movie Empuraan tomorrow. The tickets are booked. The movie has created a lot of controversy in Kerala and the director has decided to impose no less than 17 censors on it himself. I want to watch it before the jingoistic scissors find its way to the movie. It is surprising that the people of Kerala took such exception to this movie when the same people had no problem with the utterly malicious and mendacious movie The Kerala Story (2023). [My post on that movie, which I didn’t watch, is here .] Empuraan is based partly on the Gujarat riots of 2002. The riots were real and the BJP’s role in it (Mr Modi’s, in fact) is well-known. So, Empuraan isn’t giving the audience any falsehood as The Kerala Story did. Moreover, The Kerala Story maligned the people of Kerala while Empuraan is about something that happened in the faraway Gujarat quite long ago. Why are the people of Kerala then upset with Empuraan ? Because it tells the truth, M...

Empuraan – Review

Revenge is an ancient theme in human narratives. Give a moral rationale for the revenge and make the antagonist look monstrously evil, then you have the material for a good work of art. Add to that some spices from contemporary politics and the recipe is quite right for a hit movie. This is what you get in the Malayalam movie, Empuraan , which is running full houses now despite the trenchant opposition to it from the emergent Hindutva forces in the state. First of all, I fail to understand why so much brouhaha was hollered by the Hindutvans [let me coin that word for sheer convenience] who managed to get some 3 minutes censored from the 3-hour movie. The movie doesn’t make any explicit mention of any of the existing Hindutva political parties or other organisations. On the other hand, Allahu Akbar is shouted menacingly by Islamic terrorists, albeit towards the end. True, the movie begins with an implicit reference to what happened in Gujarat in 2002 after the Godhra train burnin...