Love & Indian Society- the (dis)connect

This post has been published by me as a team member of The Blue Ink Society for the “Super 6″ round of Bloggers Premier League (BPL) – The first ever unique, elite team blogging of blog world. To catch the BPL action and also be part of future editions and other contests, visit and register at Cafe GingerChai

******************

When we talk about love and the Indian Society, there are vastly different images that come to mind. One is the impossibly perfect love as depicted by main stream Indian Cinema – replete with beautiful people, exotic foreign or Indian locales and picture perfect love, for the person, the families. On the other side, there is reality which is full of repressiveness, blood, gore, violence and often heartbreak.

Love … Its not easy to write or talk about it, is it? It is a vast ocean of emotions. We have stories written on it, we have poems penned about it, we have movies made on it. Yet it is so complex that there has not been a clear-cut definition of love.

Wikipedia says Love is any of a number of emotions related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure (“I loved that meal”) to intense interpersonal attraction (“I love my wife”). This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

In the context of Indian society, love has been twisted around many a times.

Take parental love for instance. A son, from the day he is born, is loved by his parents so much that not a day passes by when they don’t remind him of how much he owes them for all their sacrifices. Even after he is married he is expected to disregard his wife to prove that his love is solely dedicated to his parents.

Whereas a girl, from the day she is born, is conditioned to love not just her parents, her siblings but, when the time arises, is expected to love her parents-in-law also even if they don’t reciprocate her love. Even if they treat her like a doormat.

I would also like to mention a love that our darling children demonstrate towards us, i.e. the cupboard love. Since we control the purse strings, and make the rules they have to abide with, they spend a lot of time buttering us up, softening us so that we buy them the latest expensive game/dress in the market. Sadly this makes them very manipulative and self-centered.

Often when both parents are working, we tend to give them a lot of money and give in to their whims. We are not there to discipline them or check them when they go overboard. This adds to the problem and makes one wonder if we are raising a generation of children with very little self discipline and ethics.

Take our love for God ….We are so blinded by the love for our religion, that we are willing to go to any length to justify our beliefs, no matter how ridiculous and unreasonable they are. We agree to feed our idols, deities with laddoos, milk when there are millions of people who are deprived of food. We don’t even think twice before throwing small children in the well to please God. If only we realize the only way to please God is to love our fellow beings. We take our love for Gods to ridiculous lengths, constructing temples for not only our religious deities but even for Cine Stars like Khushboo, even though there is rampant poverty and perhaps the money spent would have been better utilized in feeding, clothing and educating the poor.

It would be remiss of me not to write about the negative types of love. These types are really poisoning our Indian Society. We all know about obsessive love, the kind that was immortalized by Shah Rukh Khan in the movie Darr. The person is so obsessive about the object of his/her affections that he/she becomes a stalker or even a killer. This is a disease called obsessive love disorder. The person becomes so obsessive that he tends to treat the object of his affections like a possession. If he can not get her, no one else can. The insane lover may try to kill, maim or even disfigure the object of his affection by throwing acid on her face.

On one side we move the progressive way by legalizing live-in relationships thereby giving a fresh, positive hope for people in love who don’t want to bind themselves to any institution. And on the other side there are sects in our society who still harbor the regressive thought that people having the same Gotra cannot marry each other. And if a couple challenges that belief, then the guardians of such ridiculous ideologies don’t shirk from killing in the name of community honour.

Yes, rapists also rape in the name of love. But I cannot call it love. It is more of a demonstration of power.

Our society is going through a state of change. On one hand laws have been enacted to punish the Khaps and also to legalize homosexuality. Yes, the society has become permissive, so much so that urban youth feel that it is necessary to have a boy friend or girl friend to be considered cool. On the other hand we have the so called guardians of society creating totally unnecessary furore on Valentine’s Day, damaging shops selling valentines and even accosting couples out together.

On one side you have Sania Mirza and Shoaib Akhtar ignoring the India –Pakistan enmity for the sake of their love, on the other side you have a mother being arrested for killing her pregnant daughter for loving and daring to marry a colleague belonging to the lower caste.

Love is a multifarious thing, said a poet. Yes it is, and it is the most joyous and positive emotion, but perhaps true love in which both the partners are free and respected is becoming a rarity especially in the Indian society today.

The Image in This Post is a Teamwork by THE BLUE INK SOCIETY

And..its a century!!

Yes..this is my 100th post. Frankly I cant believe I’ve hit the ‘100’ mark. In fact when I started blogging about a year and half back, I didnt think I could stick by beyond a month, leave aside a year( which I completed in September 2009).

I can never thank my husband enough for actually urging me to start blogging. It was at his insistence that I decided to try out this medium to express my thoughts on things happening in and around my life. Although I’m pretty much sure that he is cursing himself now for that suggestion :D. He wouldn’t have imagined in his wildest of dreams that I would become a certified blog-addict.

I never considered myself a writer( I still don’t), so I didn’t know what to expect when I began to express my thoughts by jotting down in words. Barring my family and very few friends nobody really knew I was blogging. And honestly I didnt do anything either to reach out to others and make them aware of my page. Even though I used to come across some awe-inspiring posts, yet somehow I always resisted myself from leaving comments there. I felt my words would not do justice to those inspiring posts.

And when I got a comment from Nitya, a fellow blogger-mom for one of my posts, I realized to my utter joy that my posts could make a connect too. That comment made me feel really good about myself. That also made me realize that I should also start leaving my comments on others’ blogs and give them a chance to feel good too.

Blogging has given me a lot. For one it has given me a platform to speak my mind. It also gives me a sense of thrill and excitement which I feel while writing my posts. I feel immense satisfaction when I hit that ‘publish’ button and then a sense of anxiety filled with thrill again when I get an alert about the first comment on each post.

And I’ve also realized that I’m now more open to debates and discussions which I always stayed away from otherwise :). It feels nice to read the other side of your viewpoint.

And most importantly blogging has given me such wonderful friends in such a short span that it makes me feel as though I’ve known them for ages. Some of you have come to mean so much to me that the I truly treasure this closeness and bonding. That means a lot to me :).

Last but never the least I thank each and everyone of you who reads my posts and shares your thoughts on them and makes me feel so great. You overlook the fact that most of what I write seem gibberish and yet you read them patiently enough to leave your valuable comments 🙂

Thank you from the bottom of my heart :).

I can just go on and on but I realize that I have to rush to Namnam’s school. Its her graduation day today and R & I have to be there for her. So bye for now.

Hugs!

Wordless Wednesday-1

The week goneby…

was nothing much to write home about.

First, there was the Madrid open which Federer lost to Nadal taking the latter’s all-time tally of wins against the world no 1 to 14. Fedex has a meager 7 to his credit :(.

Then I saw Swaram flashing her state of mind on Facebook with an ecstatic “Nadal won Nadal won … yay yay yay!” making me sulk even more.

And Sakshi even went a step further by asking me to imagine her having dinner with Federer!

If you have friends like such, you don’t need enemies do you?? 😈

Anyway, as Masood, a fellow manic member of the Federer Fan Club put up on my Facebook page, ‘Come Grand-slams (French Open this month and Wimbledon in June), we’ll have plenty to cheer about’. So here’s looking forward to the coming months with my fingers crossed!!

—–

Next my internet connection came crashing down crippling me for two days. The two days felt like two decades for me! Ok ok that’s a bit too filmy! I get it 😀 . What I mean to say is that those two days did reiterate my belief that internet had become an integral part of my life. It’s hard to imagine a day, a life without its gracious presence!

—–

Then I came across a very tragic and disturbing bit of news. A 4-year-old kindergartener died due to intense heat and asphyxiation after being trapped in her school-bus for more than 4 hours. It was an incident that shook up the entire Indian community here. The parents of school-going children were enraged at the school authorities, the management, the transport company to whom the bus belonged. Everybody was being blamed. And rightfully so.

The bus driver, who has been arrested, should not be the only person to be blamed for failing to check on the bus thoroughly before leaving the school, thereby leaving the poor little girl locked inside the bus. The school has to be held equally responsible for not ensuring the same.

If the schools are charging a certain amount from the parents as ‘bus-fee’, it should not just include a mere pick-up/drop-off of the pupils but should also include the responsibility of ensuring their safe transportation.

Many schools here, reportedly, do not adhere to the guidelines set by the Supreme Education Council. A set of parents have decided to form a committee and hold a meeting with the council to report such schools to them.

I hope these efforts yield some positive results and such tragic incidents never happen.

When I saw the photo of little Sarah, I couldn’t stop crying, because, in her I could see my Namnam.

Next year Namnam will start going to a proper school and I already feel the pangs of anxiety thinking about her safety and well-being.

—–

Finally I bade goodbye to a very dear friend who left Qatar for good to re-base in India. She was my closest friend here and our daughters were the best of friends( I hope they remain so though) .

We gave birth to our daughters around the same time. In fact I remember, when we were in India(she in Kerala, me in Delhi) for our respective deliveries, we would call each other up now and then to talk about our heartburn, nausea, cravings, aversions, baby-kicks, so on and so forth.
When we moved to Doha, it was amazing to see how quickly the girls connected with each other.

I know we will stay in touch, but it will not be the same as living in the same building, knowing there’s a friend living right next door who you can run to for a heart-to-heart talk. Parting is so very hard! I will miss you, J and Namnam will miss O even more :).

—–
This is how my past week has been. I hope the coming week will pass by more favorably and will give lot many moments to cheer about.

So, how have you been?