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?



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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

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...

Are human systems repressive?

Salma I had never heard of Salma until she was sent to the Rajya Sabha as a Member of the Parliament by Tamil Nadu a couple of weeks back and a Malayalam weekly featured her on the cover with an interview. Salma’s story made me think on the nature of certain human systems and organisations including religion. Salma was born Rajathi Samsudeen. Marriage made her Rukiya, because her husband’s family didn’t think of Rajathi as a Muslim name. Salma is the pseudonym she chose as a writer. Salma’s life was always controlled by one system or another. Her religion and its ruthlessly patriarchal conventions determined the crests and troughs of her life’s waves. Her schooling ended the day she chose to watch a movie with a friend, another girl whose education was stopped too. They were in class 9. When Rajathi protested that her cousin, a boy, was also watching the same movie at the same time in the same cinema hall, her mother’s answer was, “He’s a boy; boys can do anything.” Rajathi was...