Love

I never loved anyone until I married at the age of 35. Maggie taught me love with her agonised endurance of my narcissistic whims and fancies. I was not aware of her agonies until the bubble of my ego burst under certain pressures imposed on it brutally by a few self-appointed benefactors. While I’m grateful to the benefactors for their ruthless devotion to their task, I could never forget the fact that they overdid it with more zeal than the medieval crusaders. Some scars left by crusaders remain with you until your end.

The lessons are obvious enough, however. One, love endures, agonises and transforms. As one of the first Christian missionaries, Saint Paul, said, “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” [1 Corinthians 13:7] Saint Paul was an ardent crusader too. But he knew that “Love always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” He did not say that love transforms. But it does. Maggie transformed me. Years later, today, my love has transformative effects on some of my students, as they have told me.   

Lesson two is that narcissists don’t love others. They love only themselves. Perhaps that is not love at all. It is a less loathsome camouflage for self-hatred. The narcissist is like the man on top of a cliff: everybody below looks small to him and he looks small to everybody else. While listening to Prime Minister Modi, I have often wondered whether he isn’t that man on top of a lonely cliff. But it is his narcissism that drove him there; he elbowed out everyone on the way to reach there – everyone including his wife. I have also wondered what would have happened if he had started loving people somewhere on the way. India’s history would have been significantly different. Only hate-mongers can idolise narcissists and their tribe is increasing in contemporary India.

A corollary I learnt in the process of learning to love was that most benefactors including missionaries are not motivated by love. They have many other motives some of which are not at all any nobler than the narcissist’s motives for his actions.  That is why missionaries have not been able to transform the world. They may speak in the language of angels, as Paul said, but the world will continue to remain the same, if not become worse, because they have no love in their hearts. They love their god[s] more than their fellow creatures. They love their churches/temples/mosques and their holy cows. They will kill for the sake of these perceived holy things. And killing can never come from love. Never.

Another lesson I learnt over time is that when you learn to love, most evils such as greed and jealousy make an exit from your system slowly. Love makes you compassionate. It makes you more understanding. You begin to see why others behave as they do. And you begin to feel compassion for them. Not hatred. Not jealousy. Not the desire to defeat them.

Love is a symphony. Quite many instruments play in harmony. Love is the harmony.

PS. Inspired by Indispire Edition 241: