Pyaar Ek Dhoka Kyun Hai?
I have absolutely loved following AIB’s #PyaarEkDhokaHai campaign running up to Valentine’s Day this year. Starting from silly Bollywood-ness, it was incredible to see the number of people resonating with the vibe around it and actually turning up for the ‘shoutings’ (a new human gathering type has been invented, I believe). The campaign ended with a more poignant message of self-love and how we don’t need to be with another person to be complete. Being single is awesome! What I want to look at here is, why does love get such a bad name?
Through my twenties, I’ve observed friends indulging in love in many different ways. These are the major trends I’ve come across –
- The serial lovers: People who jump from one relationship to another incessantly; with volatile and tense breaks in between.
- The calcu-lovers: People who assess the socio-economic or ideological compatibility of whoever they date before they choose to fall in love. This funnily includes both the conformists and the rebels.
- The pragmatists: They search for love exactly when they feel their parents would start pushing them for marriage. They seem to follow a love-better-than-arranged theory.
- The love-shy: They’ve been there, done that and are left with a bitter after-taste.
Where I come from, a person’s life in their twenties comes with many super stressful deadlines. We must setup our careers, get married and grow up all before the gong hits 30. Love, more than a feeling, becomes the best possible way to navigate this overwhelming not-so-joyful-ride to making it all happen.
The spiritual truth that ‘nothing or no-one can make us feel whole, except ourselves’ is a relatively well-known catchphrase. But the fact is that we’re often taking on pressures and aspirations that are much beyond our dreamy and distracted minds. Our education system did very little to help us develop life-skills and a lot of us are learning through failures. Sometimes I look around me at a lot of my twenty-something friends and peers and see a bunch of over-sized teletubbies.
The lover(s) or the subject of love becomes so much more than what it’s meant to be. Our expectations from love are way beyond that of an authentic sense of chemistry, connection and care. And given that we are in many ways overwhelmed by our own lives constantly, we fail love and it fails us.
Unfortunately, maybe #PyaarEkDhokaHai, but it doesn’t have to be. Unlike marriage (perhaps, the most successful social enterprise in human history), pyaar (love) doesn’t have to come with the burden of forever. And just like marriage, it doesn’t have to happen at all. I really wish to see more and more people experience love with animals, plants, friends, family, themselves and their hobbies as a way of building a community of care around them in overwhelming times. Pyaar omnipresent hai. Fortunately, pyaar bas pyaar hai (love is love). However, unlike the magnificently marketed solution of marriage, it’s not a medicine for everything that’s wrong with life.