Growing up under Bollywood’s bubble of love has you believing every Simran meets a Raj until you grow up realising their love story was deeply flawed. That relationships are not as dreamy as Hindi films misled you into thinking. But because we were young and well…deluded, we bought into their irony-poisoned notion of love, somehow equating the world’s most complex feeling solely to a romantic context.
My take on love was no different. Originally, it was purely materialistic. Like, remember those days when we had the luxury to screech and demand without thinking? We’d repeatedly ask our parents to buy us that Dairy Milk until they reluctantly gave in. Well, that’s how it began. If they love you, they’ll give you the things you want. One aspect of love that became my entire definition. So, when I was five, and my best friend didn’t share Uncle Chips with me, I reconsidered our friendship, thinking she did not love me because I would always share.
Then few mistakes and teenage hormones later, I concluded love comes through relationships because everybody around me seemed to be in one. They looked happy, but you know how teenage relationships are. Breezy until one storm knocks off the entire boat. At the time, I was aware that in a few cases, school love stories survived the test of time. I was on a mission to be that rare force of nature.
During those years, my tryst with love had evolved to degrade. ‘Didn’t love mean grand gestures?’ or so the teenager inferred, whose only testimonial for great love was SRK movies in his romantic era. Also, at the time, everybody was addicted to Facebook, so well, whichever couple spent the maximum time ‘chatting’ was the greatest love story in history. Or, arguing. Didn’t hero-heroine hate the sight of each other only to fall unabashedly in love made for every Bollywood rom-com ever? So, fights are natural, but you gotta move on, no matter how much it hurts, cos they say it’s out of love. Right? (No, it’s actually messed up)
So you grow up, messing relationships up, falling for the wrong people, reading lots and lots and lots of books, receiving a couple of reality-checks, and then, almost out of nowhere, you reach that mind-boggling moment of epiphany. Things start making sense. You get enlightened. You realise that you’ve had it all wrong. You’ve been aching for one outlet to fill one aspect of life, without acknowledging all the other sources of love and happiness that have sustained you since the beginning. Family, Friends, and all the ridiculous things you do just for the heck of it.
Ridiculous things I do? Re-watch Friends every second year, relate to every lyric that Taylor Swift sings, watch videos on how rockets work because becoming an astronaut was the first dream, stare at moon on a pretty night, save endless reels on Instagram thinking I’d see them again, purchase books then forget to read them…and well, the list could go on. I think a lot of things and people make me happy and it would be unfair to restrict happiness to one person.
I also enjoy silence. You know, the idea of just sitting and doing nothing and being okay with it. Going off-topic, but I also happen to have read Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays With Morrie. Now, I’m not here to give book recommendations, but if there’s any book you should read once in your life, this is one of them. “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love and let it come in. Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational act‘”, wrote Albom in the memoir.
I’ve also come to terms with the fact that love is also partly selfless. You see, Joey Tribbiani has already clarified there’s no such thing as a selfless good deed, and that is why I say that love is PARTLY selfless. Making your favourite people happy will make you the happiest. Showing up for them on their important days is something you do out of choice and not out of formality. Turns out, that being selfless isn’t tad bit as harsh as it sounds. It’s actually right there in the heart of things.
So, what’s my definition of love, the point of this long-ass context? Simply put, love, perhaps, is a catalyst that drives all actions. It has various (living and non-living) sources. And it’s stupid, at times, but is actually pretty kind. It’s selfless. And if your best friend doesn’t share Uncle Chips with you, ask them to go to hell, and move on.
