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

Country where humour died

Humour died a thousand deaths in India after May 2014. The reason – let me put it as someone put it on X.  The stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra called a politician some names like ‘traitor’ which made his audience laugh because they misunderstood it as a joke. Kunal Kamra has to explain the joke now in a court of justice. I hope his judge won’t be caught with crores of rupees of black money in his store room . India itself is the biggest joke now. Our courts of justice are huge jokes. Our universities are. Our temples, our textbooks, even our markets. Let alone our Parliament. I’m studying the Ramayana these days in detail because I’ve joined an A-to-Z blog challenge and my theme is Ramayana, as I wrote already in an earlier post . In order to understand the culture behind Ramayana, I even took the trouble to brush up my little knowledge of Sanskrit by attending a brief course. For proof, here’s part of a lesson in my handwriting.  The last day taught me some subhashit...
10 comments
Read more

Lucifer and some reflections

Let me start with a disclaimer: this is not a review of the Malayalam movie, Lucifer . These are some thoughts that came to my mind as I watched the movie today. However, just to give an idea about the movie: it’s a good entertainer with an engaging plot, Bollywood style settings, superman type violence in which the hero decimates the villains with pomp and show, and a spicy dance that is neatly tucked into the terribly orgasmic climax of the plot. The theme is highly relevant and that is what engaged me more. The role of certain mafia gangs in political governance is a theme that deserves to be examined in a good movie. In the movie, the mafia-politician nexus is busted and, like in our great myths, virtue triumphs over vice. Such a triumph is an artistic requirement. Real life, however, follows the principle of entropy: chaos flourishes with vengeance. Lucifer is the real winner in real life. The title of the movie as well as a final dialogue from the eponymous hero sugg...
4 comments
Read more

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. ...
10 comments
Read more

Violence and Leaders

The latest issue of India Today magazine studies what it calls India’s Gross Domestic Behaviour (GDB). India is all poised to be an economic superpower. But what about its civic sense? Very poor, that’s what the study has found. Can GDP numbers and infrastructure projects alone determine a country’s development? Obviously, no. Will India be a really ‘developed’ country by 2030 although it may be $7-trillion economy by then? Again, no is the answer. India’s civic behaviour leaves a lot, lot to be desired. Ironically, the brand ambassador state of the country, Uttar Pradesh, is the worst on most parameters: civic behaviour, public safety, gender attitudes, and discrimination of various types. And UP is governed by a monk!  India Today Is there any correlation between the behaviour of a people and the values and principles displayed by their leaders? This is the question that arose in my mind as I read the India Today story. I put the question to ChatGPT. “Yes,” pat came the ...
10 comments
Read more

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...
4 comments
Read more