Skip to main content

Love’s dilemmas

Othello and Desdemona
Image from Wikipedia


Love is a complex thing though it ought to be the simplest being the most natural feeling between human beings.  Love makes the world go round.  Love is a feeling that wells up within us almost always.  We love our family members, friends, colleagues and a whole lot of people with whom we establish some sort of relationships. Yet it isn’t a very simple feeling.

Othello loved Desdemona arguably more than any man would love a woman. Yet he ended up killing her. He killed her for love. Can anyone kill the person whom he loves so much? Can we call that emotion love?

Desdemona was a pure woman who loved Othello as much as he loved her.  Her love was simple.  It was a childlike trust.  She was so innocent that she could not even prove that innocence.  Should love be so innocent, so trustful, so childlike? 

Did Othello really love Desdemona?  Or did he love himself more?  He killed her because he thought she had betrayed him.  Let us assume that she had indeed betrayed him.  Even then can a man who genuinely loves his wife kill her?  Othello had a lot of insecurities.  He had a good share of inferiority complex.  It is that complex, his insecurity feelings, that drive Othello to kill Desdemona.  He was saving his self-respect by killing her. So who did he love more: himself or Desdemona?

Genuine love is letting go if required.  If Desdemona did really have an extramarital affair, Othello should have proved that and asked her to move out of his life.  Let her go.  That is love.  However painful that decision may be.  Love brings pains.  Love calls for suffering.  Love cannot kill.

Love cannot possess the other person.  The other person is not an object to be kept under the lock and key of my love.  She is an individual with her own emotions and rights.  I have to respect those emotions and rights.  She has to respect mine too.  What is love without that mutual respect, without certain compromise?

The plain truth is that Desdemona could not have betrayed Othello.  Her love was so pure, so genuine.  It is Othello’s failure that he could not understand that love.  What is love without understanding?

The problem in any relationship is that we let our personal complexities mingle with the relationship unnecessarily, thus obscuring it.  Some such mingling is inevitable, no doubt.  What am I without my personal idiosyncrasies?  But it is my most sacred duty to prevent my relationships from being polluted by those idiosyncrasies.  There is always an opportunity for a dialogue with the other person.  Sit down and clarify messed up things.  A good conversation has saved many a relationship.

Couldn’t Othello have saved his love if he had sat down and had a hearty colloquy with Desdemona?  

PS. For #BlogchatterA2Z – today’s letter: L

Tomorrow: Meaning


Top post on IndiBlogger, the biggest community of Indian Bloggers

Comments

  1. Roma Gupta SinhaApril 13, 2018 at 4:11 PM

    This is a very significant post with a great lesson about love especially in today’s era where anyone and everyone is ready to kill in the name of love. Sharing it with everyone I know 😊

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 13, 2018 at 8:55 PM

      Love has also become a commodity in the vitiated marketplace of our country. Let's hope people will see the light.

      Delete
  2. Purba chakrabortyApril 13, 2018 at 7:20 PM

    A wonderful post.
    True! Love cannot kill. And we should not let our complexities mingle with our relationship.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalApril 13, 2018 at 8:57 PM

      The less complex we are, the more loving we can be.

      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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more