“I love you because it’s you the one I love;
I hate you deeply, and hating you
Bend to you, and the measure of changing love for you
Is that I do not see you but love you blindly.”
— Pablo Neruda, I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You
In this era of the 21st century, when everything and anything around you is about pace and time, money and success; how big an apartment and how fabulous the vacation, when everything and anything is just about an unknown competition of proving the worth and meaning of the existence of measurable reality, where does love stand? Has it gone to the dogs or are butterflies  still felt in the stomach?
Love letters, are they still written by some hopeless romantic musing about Shakespeare’s Sonnets, or love is only meant to be projected on the ‘walls’ and in the ‘relationship status’ of our social networking profiles? With the passing away of time, is love acquiring the status of being over rated? Yes, may be. May be because many a people of this contemporary generation do think sometimes that ‘being in a relationship’Â is a statement. They might ponder, it’s time to pick a catch, as all their friends have done. They might wonder, I should be ‘having’ something better than that one, the one that my friend has. So, love too seems to be marginalized as a competition. Youthful beings, they know nothing of the pangs of life, and thus they are bound to make mistakes, popularly known as ‘experiences from which one should learn’. But when it comes to the grownups, is it the same or worse? Due to the advent of the social networking website called Facebook, the dimension of love has changed. Online dating is no more a thing for which someone has to be hush-hush about anymore, short periods of knowing each other gives way to the tag of ‘commitment’ and then when everything falls apart, you are just a click away to delete the person away from your life, ‘un-friend’ and then ‘block’. Therefore, the advancement of technology has not only made our life easier but it has also helped (I know not whether it is a help or not) us in escaping uncomfortable things. You are no more bound to give explanations, no more blah blah-ing. One fine morning, you may find that it has all been erased. Is it so easy to remove someone from your life, as if you are wiping the floor?
The undaunted romanticism, the ‘forever’ promises, cant-live-without-each-other, where are these? This radical time of ours, is it making us shallow? May be yes. May be that is why we condemn homosexual relationships. We are so very engrossed with the ‘morals’ and ‘society’, we just tend to forget that it is actually two human beings in love, we tend to forget that may be gender is just an illusion. The era, when films like Brokeback Mountain and Blue is the warmest color are being critically acclaimed, some of us are sitting rigidly on our preconceived notions, hell bent on what we believe, stubborn as ever.
This is the month of Love as some say, where there are ‘days’ designated to celebrate an eternal and universal emotion. How funny is that! You can celebrate love and your loved ones, any day and every day. Don’t save your money for this ‘special’ day to gift something ‘special’ to your chosen one. Just remember to carry a one rupee chewing gum everyday for that person, a flower of any kind or a letter just saying the ultimate three words ‘I Love You’ some other day; you are making that person feel special continuously, everyday of your existence. Isn’t that the celebration of Love? Couple’s discount in restaurants and cafés, life size teddy bears and the baby talk all around shrieks commercialism and nothing more.
Plato, in his posthumous work, Symposium, said that human beings were hermaphrodites until God separated them into two so that the one half will search all over the world for the other half. Thus, the liaison sniffs completion which will be attained only when the perfect half is traced out. Heterosexuals or homosexuals, Love is about finding that right and the perfect half of your soul and when the union happens, it is all fireworks. As Kundera said that love is born, “when the woman cannot resist the voice calling forth her terrified soul; the man cannot resist the woman whose soul thus responds to his voice” (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) ( though I still believe that gender is an illusion, to me the tags of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ has nothing to do with stereotypical definition of being ‘straight’ or ‘gay’, to me it is just the anatomical distinction. Love complies with no conventionalism, no rules and no boundaries. It is free, untamed and infinite.