Skip to main content

Love and Compassion



Love is a kaleidoscopic phenomenon. It has infinite hues which can form endless permutations and combinations.
Admiration can turn into romantic love which can change into murderous love as it happens in the case of Othello and Desdemona. “She loved me for the dangers I had passed,” says Othello, “And I loved her that she did pity them.” Their love transcended their races. It offended quite a lot of people. But theirs was genuine love, a love that went out of oneself to the other, a love that embraced the other in an elevated realm. Such love makes the lovers grow further as individuals.
But there’s always an Iago hiding somewhere just like the serpent in the primeval Eden. Othello is a soldier by profession. The soldier in him militates against the lover in him because of the games that Iago plays with him. If he was more romantic than belligerent he would have probed more into the allegations against his wife. But that precisely is one of the most difficult problems of love: your nature plays a vital role in it. Othello chose to be a soldier first and a husband after that. That choice costs Desdemona her life. An innocent woman who deserved all the love that Othello was capable of giving her is killed by him.
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra also loved each other very much though their love was more of lust than the kind of intimacy that Othello and Desdemona were capable of. Antony’s lust was a scorching fire that could “let Rome in Tiber melt, and the wide arch / Of the rang’d empire fall.” Kingdoms are mere clay for Antony when he is in the embrace of Cleopatra.
But theirs is love too. A different kind of love.
Love finds a totally different hue when we come to King Lear and his daughters. Filial affection has its multi-colours as Shakespeare shows in that play like no one else can. Cordelia can love her father so much that she can die for him while her sisters are just the opposite. Sons and daughters never love their parents the same way. That love too has infinite varieties.
Love is quite mysterious.
Diogenes with his lamp
Source: Wikipedia
Compassion is a different thing. Easy to understand though difficult to practise. Compassion is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of the other. Compassion makes you go out of yourself and help the other. Compassion is perhaps the best virtue if you wish to create a better world. All religions should focus on compassion instead of the mysterious and complicated love.
Can you be compassionate unless you have love in your heart? Perhaps you can. Compassion can arise from understanding. Intellectual understanding can lead one to compassion. Many great philosophers carried much compassion in their hearts though they didn’t appear to be quite loving, let alone lovable. What motivated Diogenes to carry a lamp in bright daylight to search for an honest man was compassion. Or was it?

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 309: What could be the difference between love and compassion? #loveandcompassion


Comments

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

Break Your Barriers

  Guest Post Break Your Barriers : 10 Strategic Career Essentials to Grow in Value by Anu Sunil  A Review by Jose D. Maliekal SDB Anu Sunil’s Break Your Barriers is a refreshing guide for anyone seeking growth in life and work. It blends career strategy, personal philosophy, and practical management insights into a resource that speaks to educators, HR professionals, and leaders across both faith-based and secular settings. Having spent nearly four decades teaching philosophy and shaping human resources in Catholic seminaries, I found the book deeply enriching. Its central message is clear: most limitations are self-imposed, and imagination is the key to breaking through them. As the author reminds us, “The only limit to your success is your imagination.” The book’s strength lies in its transdisciplinary approach. It treats careers not just as jobs but as vocations, rooted in the dignity of labour and human development. Themes such as empathy, self-mastery, ethical le...
3 comments
Read more

The Irony of Hindutva in Nagaland

“But we hear you take heads up there.” “Oh, yes, we do,” he replied, and seizing a boy by the head, gave us in a quite harmless way an object-lesson how they did it.” The above conversation took place between Mary Mead Clark, an American missionary in British India, and a Naga tribesman, and is quoted in Clark’s book, A Corner in India (1907). Nagaland is a tiny state in the Northeast of India: just twice the size of the Lakhimpur Kheri district in Uttar Pradesh. In that little corner of India live people belonging to 16 (if not more) distinct tribes who speak more than 30 dialects. These tribes “defy a common nomenclature,” writes Hokishe Sema, former chief minister of the state, in his book, Emergence of Nagaland . Each tribe is quite unique as far as culture and social setups are concerned. Even in physique and appearance, they vary significantly. The Nagas don’t like the common label given to them by outsiders, according to Sema. Nagaland is only 0.5% of India in area. T...
13 comments
Read more

Rushing for Blessings

Pilgrims at Sabarimala Millions of devotees are praying in India’s temples every day. The rush increases year after year and becomes stampedes occasionally. Something similar is happening in the religious places of other faiths too: Christianity and Islam, particularly. It appears that Indians are becoming more and more religious or spiritual. Are they really? If all this religious faith is genuine, why do crimes keep increasing at an incredible rate? Why do people hate each other more and more? Isn’t something wrong seriously? This is the pilgrimage season in Kerala’s Sabarimala temple. Pilgrims are forced to leave the temple without getting a darshan (spiritual view) of the deity due to the rush. Kerala High Court has capped the permitted number of pilgrims there at 75,000 a day. Looking at the serpentine queues of devotees in scanty clothing under the hot sun of Kerala, one would think that India is becoming a land of ascetics and renouncers. If religion were a vaccine agains...
8 comments
Read more

Mahatma Ayyankali’s Relevance Today

About a year before he left for Chicago (1893), Swami Vivekananda visited Kerala and described the state (then Travancore-Cochin-Malabar princely states) as a “lunatic asylum.” The spiritual philosopher was shocked by the brutality of the caste system that was in practice in the region. The peasant caste of Pulayas , for example, had to keep a distance of 90 feet from Brahmins and 64 feet from Nairs. The low caste people were denied most human rights. They could not access education, enter temple premises, or buy essentials from markets. They were not even considered as humans. Ayyankali (1863-1941) was a Pulaya leader who emerged to confront the situation. I just finished reading a biography of his in Malayalam and was highly impressed by the contributions of the great man who came to be known in Kerala as the Mahatma of the Dalits . What prompted me to order a copy of the biography was an article I read in a Malayalam periodical last week. The article described how Ayyankali...
14 comments
Read more