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Showing posts with the label love

India’s Valentines

India’s ruling party, Narendra Modi’s own party, wants Indians to celebrate Valentine’s Day as Cow Hugging Day . Valentine is a Western concept, they inform us. India has a superior sexual morality. Like what you see in the classical temples of Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh, the Sun Temples of Odisha and Gujarat, Virupaksa of Hampi in Karnataka, the Jain temples of Rajasthan, the Sathyamurthy Perumal Temple of Tamil Nadu, and the Lingaraj Temple of Odisha. If I post pictures of the sculptures from those temples, Google may block my post as obscene because Google is Western and India is the West’s Guru now. But let me try anyway to put a representative pic or two here, just to give you an idea of what ancient Indian civilisation was offering to its temple devotees.  Just Google for Indian temple erotica for a lot, lot more India is a country that gave Kamasutra to the world. Kamasutra is not just a sex manual though any average man and some women too will love it as that. It describes

The Tenderness of Love

Book Review Title: The Travelling Cat Chronicles Author: Hiro Arikawa Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel Publisher: Penguin Random House, 2019 Pages: 249 This book will touch the most tender core of your heart. It is a love story with a difference: it is love between a man and his cat. Right from page one to the last page, this novel gives the reader a feeling of tenderness. Reading this novel is like sitting on the side of a beautiful mountain brook and listening to the gurgling of water while feeling the gossamer caress of the cool breeze on your body. I bought this book precisely because I have four pet cats who all have a special place each in my heart. If you love cats, this book will keep you hooked. Even if you don’t have a soft corner for those creatures, you will still love this book for the tenderness it makes you feel. The author, Hiro Arikawa, is a cat-lover, obviously.  Hiro Arikawa with her cat Satoru Miyawaki is a young man who takes care of a

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so

Florentino’s Many Loves

Florentino Ariza has had 622 serious relationships (combo pack with sex) apart from numerous fleeting liaisons before he is able to embrace the only woman whom he loved with all his heart and soul. And that embrace happens “after a long and troubled love affair” that lasted 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days. Florentino is in his late 70s when he is able to behold, and hold as well, the very body of his beloved Fermina, who is just a few years younger than him. She now stands before him with her wrinkled shoulders, sagged breasts, and flabby skin that is as pale and cold as a frog’s. It is the culmination of a long, very long, wait as far as Florentino is concerned, the end of his passionate quest for his holy grail. “I’ve remained a virgin for you,” he says. All those 622 and more women whose details filled the 25 diaries that he kept writing with meticulous devotion have now vanished into thin air. They mean nothing now that he has reached where he longed to reach all his life. The

Love is Dirty

Bob on my sofa Cleanliness belongs to air-conditioned rooms. Heaven must be air-conditioned since cleanliness is next to godliness. I keep my windows open so that my cats can come in and go out as they like. They do make the walls and windowsills dirty. Maggie and I clean the places regularly as well as we can. My cats make the sofa covers dirty. It’s my duty to wash the covers regularly while Maggie cooks food for me and our cats. We are happy, cats and us. Our relatives have problems, however. How can we keep the house clean with all these cats around? Our hearts are clean, friends. We keep our house clean too. But if you notice a cat’s pawprint somewhere on the floor tiles or smell a kitten on the sofa covers, please understand that love has its limitations like tolerance. I have seen children’s toys leaving footprints all over. Love leaves stains like paw prints. Where there is love, there will inevitably be some footprints. Air-conditioned rooms are clean. They have

Love and Hell

Russian Dostoevsky and French Jean-Paul Sartre are both great writers. The latter is more of a philosopher than a novelist, I’d say. Both have left indelible marks in the world of literature. But both have diametrically opposite attitudes towards human society. Sartre apparently hated people (except beautiful women). Hell is other people, he said. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, upheld love as the greatest virtue. Hell, for Dostoevsky, is the suffering caused by a person’s inability to love.  Jean-Paul Sartre Sartre thought of love as conflict. People in love try to control each other, he said. Lovers get trapped in vicious circles of sadomasochistic power games which are meant primarily for keeping the other from leaving you. Love is vulnerable precisely because the other person is free to leave you. Love cannot be forcibly extracted from anyone. But many people do just that: extract it. That’s why love becomes power games. Dostoevsky would look upon Sartre with commiseration. But

Wherefore art thou?

Romeo and Juliet [ PNGwing ] In Shakespeare’s notable romantic tragedy, Juliet hurls the question: “Wherefore art thou Romeo?” The meaning is ‘Why are you Romeo?’ Those who are familiar with the play will understand what Juliet meant. If Romeo’s name was different, their love would have met with no resistance. Romeo was the son and heir of the Montague family while Juliet was a Capulet. There is a violent feud going on between the two families and hence the love between Romeo and Juliet is not welcome. Juliet’s question, in fact, is: ‘Why are you a Montague?’ ‘What’s in a name?’ A few moments later in the play, Juliet who has not turned 14 yet, will ask. That little girl who is yet to understand that there is much to a name will end up stabbing herself in the heart for the sake of love. Wherefore art thou, Juliet? I am left thinking. I turned 63 the other day. [Hitler and I share the same birthday!] Half a century older than Juliet, I ask myself: Wherefore art thou, Tomichan?

Quintin Matsys

Quintin Matsys, from Wikipedia There was a young man in Antwerp. And there was a young girl too. We don’t need anything more to begin a romantic story. And that’s just what happened. The man and the girl fell in love with each other. Passionately. The normal course would have been marriage and family life. But that didn’t happen. Because the man was a blacksmith and farrier by profession and the girl was the daughter of a painter. ‘I don’t want my daughter to marry a blacksmith,’ the master painter asserted. It was in the 15 th century. Feminism was not even a thought-experiment. And the boys didn’t have all the fun. Love has a unique power – the century doesn’t matter. Quintin Matsys was determined to win over the master painter and then his daughter. He sneaked into the master’s studio one day and painted a small fly on the master’s current frame. When the master returned to the studio, he tried to swat the fly only to discover that it was a painted one. The master was quick t

Friendship

Image from disneyclips Philosopher Nietzsche was of the opinion that what makes unhappy marriages is lack of friendship rather than lack of love. As a man who has celebrated the silver jubilee of his wedding, I raise my hat in deference to the philosopher. What has sustained my married life is the friendship that has existed between the two of us. Even the other day, someone asked Maggie whether ours was a love marriage. We give that impression, the inquirer explained. We have faced this question umpteen times by now. Even my students raise that question when they get an opportunity. When husband and wife see themselves as friends, the demands made by traditional roles of husband and wife vanish. I don’t have to be the domineering man of the house in a traditional Indian family and Maggie doesn’t have to be India’s ideal submissive wife. We are rather like Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet. Piglet sidles up from behind calling, ‘Pooh!’ ‘Yes, Piglet!’ ‘Nothing.’ Piglet takes Pooh’s p

God dies

Picture from LatinTimes ‘You’re so powerless, Pilate,’ Jesus thought as he stood in the praetorium.   The prefect of Caesar had washed his hands off his responsibility to uphold the truth.   ‘What is truth?’ he had asked. He did not wait for an answer.   Jesus was not going to answer him anyway.   He knew as well as Pilate that definitions were not what mattered to either of them.   ‘I am the truth,’ Jesus had said many times.   ‘You are the truth,’ he would have told Pilate, ‘if you wish to be.’   ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’ The crowd outside the praetorium clamours louder and louder.   Being very religious, they have not entered the praetorium.   The praetorium is a pagan place and Yahweh’s chosen people should not enter pagan places on the Passover day lest they be defiled. The High Priests, Annas and Caiaphas, instigated the people by wielding their religious power.   Jesus had set the axe at the very root of their religion.   Their religion meant rubrics a

Hatred as Love

One of the easiest things we can do is to masquerade hatred as love.   Most of the present day patriots (or nationalists, as they consider themselves) are motivated by hatred though they think that it is love of their nation that guides them.   It is the hatred of a particular section of people that really motivates these patriots. Hence the violence that underlies the patriotism. If you genuinely love your country, you will find ways of promoting its welfare.   Love is not destructive.   Love does not kill.   Cruelty is cruelty even if you bring in gods and scriptures to justify it.   In the olden days religious people sacrificed animals to appease gods.   That was cruelty to animals though not perceived as such by worshippers.   Today’s religious people sacrifice human beings belonging to other creeds in order to appease gods.   Whether gods are appeased or not, one can eliminate enemies with the contentment of a devout worshipper when religion is invoked to sanction cr