Love actually-2…
My friend posted this comment to my post "Love actually…" :
"I’m a little confused. Infatuation as I understand is a titillating impulse you feel without understanding the right nature of the person in front of you. Love is a little way ahead and is something when you feel like making your mate happy by appropriate means available at your disposal.
Why is this so that both these phenomenon require some attributes like wealth, Good looks, sexual appeal etc as catalysts. And also these impulses are bound to disappear or to some extent reduce once you are in the hold of the situation why that is so??
Also why don’t we feel something similar for individuals of the same sex?? Why love means being together?? Cause if it is all about giving it can be supported remotely…Where is the space for things like respect, care, reverence etc.? Are these very diff from “love”?
As for love, it’s a fake set of environment an individual creates around his/her self bounded by sexual needs and is more prominent in people having a very low EQ. Thus what all I can say is that love is opium of fools isn’t it so??? Kindly oblige by answering or sending a mail. " ….
Then, after an argument with me on orkut, he said the following:
…but rather what I meant was that sex is predominant in relationships other factors are very minute say like contributing 1%. “Marriage and morals”??
arey yaar kitni baar to
maine tujhse baat ki hi hai ki marriage is the worst possible thing in life-Marriage means commitment. Of course, so does insanity. Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy
(funny one) but reality is that marriage is all about institutionalizing sex and to some extent channelizing the material belongings of the individuals. so the point is that
Love => marriage (wrong)
sexual needs => marriage (not perfect, but a major reason)
And to me what it seems is that it's just one more ceremony in your life. You get good food good clothes etc on that day. just like a scapegoat.
Ek jo confusion hai mujhe woh yeh hai ke feelings do originate in the mental space and what i hev always believed is every feeling is just a shade of some need of yours. so we need to identify the needs first. in those needs there is nothing like LOVE.
Okay I am putting a fact here also -
perhaps human intelligence matures in a time of human life when the individual has outgrown this need. It's possible what say you and hey one more thing ……
people say I LOVE YOU!! Where does the I come from?? and to what extent does the meanings of this statement change as with the shades of I(comes from the influence of some basic need which is dominant at the time of delivery of the statement in the individual delivering the statement)
sometimes you say it after sex( with satisfaction ) sometimes before sex (in anxiety ) sometimes desperately ( this statement becomes a plea for sex ) and sometimes to console somebody (when say you feel somebody is feeling low or something) …… remember the shades are innumerable
kripya humaara shanshay nivaaran karein
but jo bhi ho bandhu sex rocks
cheers ".
So here is my answer my friend:
First, let me declare that the discussion started from love and not from sex. Your arguments are concentrated around sex. I will let them be so.
First let me prove that, love, as a whole, is not an opium of fools. You have limited love to a man-woman relationship. If u read ur own arguments again, u have rebuffed love only by relating it to sex (which u seem to view as impure in some way, though rocking). So let me introduce you to the love between parents and their kids. There is no sex involved there. But it is love nonetheless. They are not fools in love. U might argue that there is a need behind. Be a little less cynical and u will see that love itself is the need there. While discussing patriotism in ‘don’t rang it that basanti’ I argued that patriotism is also a kind of love only, which develops by being in contact with our country. And there is no limit to such examples which can be explained by the feeling of attachment humans (and animals) form to anything or anyone they come in contact with. Attchment to a house u lived for long, to the place u were born in, attachment to ur batch against other batches, to ur cricket team, the list is endless. Love is an opium, surely and I think it is opium to that an extent that it is a compulsion. You must have wondered the reasons of life. It is certainly not to run in the rat race for material things, it is not to discover more scientific stuff, then why did god create so many of us? There was a time when the only reason I could figure out was love. Because the feeling is so great that may be the god wanted more beings to experience it. Your favorite jyoti bhaiya was so elighted on hearing that someone could come to such a conclusion. Only on reading vivekanand did I again become confused, for he says that goal of life is knowledge. But that is another issue.
Love is also something which constantly pushes you to believe in god. I had a pet, a she-dog: Sherry. We took Sherry from the streets when she was nearly a new born. Since then, she was with us. She had babies later and you should have seen the way she protected them, took care of them. What was the reason for her to love them so much? She had never seen anyone take care babies before, but here she was, doing all that was right? I was bound to believe that love is programmed into her brain by the creator. It is in her genes now. Your argument against love, my dear friend, is nothing better than kiddish.
Now let’s come to sex. The sexual attraction, just as love, is also programmed into us. The problem is the taboo attached to it. I would blame this on the hindu scripts. Things related to sex have been considered impure since long. Do u know that the ‘manu-script’ doesn’t allow women going through menstruation to enter temples? I think that is preposterous and it is still followed in most urbane of the places. Such taboo can not be seen in Europe. Couples kiss in the public. Fathers freely allow their girls to live with their boyfriends. They don’t attach any kind of impurity to sex and understand the human compulsion involved. My point is that even if you (wrongly) believe that the reason for love is sex, why that should be such an impure idea, is not clear to me. I obviously believe that such a notion is stupid.
Now here is my final argument. Since humans many times, develop love and attachment to everyone (living) and everything (non living!) they come into contact with, why wouldn’t a man-woman relation automatically develop into true love, with or without sex being involved? Sex is not the reason of love. It only adds fuel to fire. By saying that sex is the reason for man-woman love, you are just trying to hold ur left ear with ur right hand and ending up pinching ur nose instead. Why u have become so disillusioned with love is beyond me, but your view certainly is really cynical and dark. You will agree with me that having sex with a prostitute and with someone you love are entirely different feelings.
Apart from this, all you have written is baby talk. Why marriage u ask? Obviously, since humans are programmed to get attracted to more than one person of the opposite sex, humans have developed the marriage concept. Note that unlike love, this is a totally artificial concept. We also do not find any analogue of marriage in animals generally. Does it end up channelising a man’s material belongings? Surely it does…but isn’t that a plus? You ask why can’t love be supported remotely? Who told you it can’t be. It is sex that can not be supported remotely. Love surely can be. Most of my 7 year affair has been long distance. Also, presently I am away from my mother. But I think that she still loves me and I love her too. You say marriage is a way to institutionalize sex. Surely, the sex gets institutionalized, but again, your argument is only based on the impurity of sex and you have not even considered the case where sex is the natural successor of love.
I know you for the past five years now. These arguments are you at your cynical and depressed best. Grow up my friend, get a girlfriend. 
Love actually…
Past few days have been a little depressing. I read Zakaria and went through a not so pleasant discussion with friends about the danish cartoons on yahoo groups. Also my Egyptian neighbour apparently has,to my bad fortune, found a possible convert in me, so he is all time babbling about the bad west and how his culture is being pushed towards McDonaldisation. Phew..I need a break. So I thought of writing about something, I wont’t say lighter, but something that’s always refreshing. Let’s talk about love 
While chat with a friend the other day, she happenned to mention that she is developing feelings for someone, we started talking about the guy and I found him worth a shot(her shot ). She, though, promptly demurred and expressed a possibility of all this being just an infatuation.
This question has troubles me many times. Sometimes I think that this funda of infatuation is strange and not totally correct. An infatuation typically is defined as "foolish and usually extravagant passion or love or admiration, generally short lived". Now the problem is that the so called true love must also have (almost)all these qualities. Let’s take the above definition a little seriously. Take it form me, being "foolish and usually extravagant(ly) passion" –ate in love is the most romantic part of it. And then any off-the-shelf love-help book for loosers will tell u (often at length) the importance of "admiration" in a love affair. So does the only problem of being "short lived" clause makes infatuation such a feared factor and love such great a feeling?
Consider a case in which the wife has planned a secret birthday party for her hubby. She is highly excited about it and on the day, when everything is ready, she is waiting for her man with utmost curiousity and a tingling fear. But enters the monster in law, who spills the beans just before the event. Not worrying about what happenned to the old lady, it is easy to see that the inability to give something to the other hurts much more(i our case, for the wife) than the inability to receive(of the guy). "The need to give", as I many times argue, is many times, the deciding factor in relationships. More importantly, the capacity of the other to receive, then obviously becomes important.
I think love happens when you are really giving and what you give is something too much cherished by the other. Metaphorically, a blind guy won’t thank you for goggles. Not only this, the flutter in your heart is also most of times, synchronised with giving and not with taking. So, just to put the old saying as the result of this post, love’s all about giving and not about receiving. So coming back to the infatuation trouble, I think that if you find someone worth a shot, check for the compatibility and go towards love, without worrying about this infatuation thing, whatever it means
The importance of trade
This post is an attempt to grasp the happening around me in my country with trade flourishing in unprecedented manners. When change happens, various opinions also come to life. Left is always opposing anything related to foreign but still the country is going the FDI/FII way. I intend to go a little deeper into all the happenings in this arena using a few posts.
The first thing we should tackle before going any further is the need of inter-border trade. Is it actually necessary? To what extend do we need it?
So suppose we don’t have inter-border trade in India. Go back a little in time. In my father's time two wheelers had a booking period of months. For telephone u had to have a connections with politicians. External competition brought efficiency. Rahul Bajaj, the boss of Bajaj scooters was the head of revolting groups when govt. was thinking about allowing foreign investments in his sector in India. "Bombay Club" being one of the famous ones. Recently, his rift with his son was brought to papers. The problem was that the son (Rajiv Bajaj) saw how the manufacturing was done abroad. The difference was that abroad, manufacturing was not labor intensive. For example, in India if they had 10 workers and 1 engineer, abroad, they had 10 engineers and 1 worker. Result was more research and product betterment. Rajiv also saw that his father had done nothing for product betterment. Chetak was nearly the same as it was 30 years ago. It shouldn’t have been a shock for him because who needs product development if you have a monopoly in the economy. Rajiv had bikes in his mind and the way he wanted to work was not his dad's. Clearly this created a rift and was publicized by the media. Rajiv had his way and the result was pulsar. Pulsar has been doing better than any bike in its segment. The research team in India put together by Rajiv showed that they could take on even the Japanese giants like Honda who launched unicorn to counter pulsar but tasted dust. This is one example. There are numerous in Indian economy alone where fathers were outsmarted by sons and fathers had to give way. My favorite ‘layman economics’ writer, Swaminathan Aiyar of 'Swaminomics' fame wrote a full chronicle of such happenings in India.
The point is that progress can not be done by sitting in our comfort zones. Some day the zone will break and others will take over. This applies not only to economy but also to personal lives of you and mine. If you don’t deserve to have something, in the long run you won’t have it. (The vice-versa, though is not valid generally. If you deserve smething, you might not get it, most of the times because you don't want to have it)
I think that inter border trade is of paramount importance. It brings efficiency in indigenous products. And in economy, no efficiency stands alone in itself. It causes more efficiency. For example, more trade needs better banking, hence u have better banks with no queues and faster transfers. More trade also means more legal intricacies, which prods the law people to clean there desks, be more efficient. More trade also means better living standards that unmistakably lead to less tolerance of the middle class towards injustice. Did anyone notice the uproar Jessica Lall case entailed recently? It is unprecedented and clearly one reason for this is also, that less people are now worried about mere sustenance in India and have time, energy and financial backings, to worry about social justice.
Another thing that is worth noting is that affluence brings tolerance in society. Sikh terrorism was curtailed but Muslim terrorism has lasted much longer. Punjab and Bihar are both agriculture oriented states, but the difference in conspicuous. The opposite of this argument is also interesting. Swaminomics once argued this opposite, that is, tolerance brings affluence. An example of this was once discussed in our economics class at IIT. Our teacher was an Assamese and told us that the problem with Assam was not lack skilled labor, but that companies won't invest so willingly in Assam, obviously because of the insurgency. This was particularly so because the companies found all they wanted in other Indian states, without worrying about the insurgency. So it's a symbiotic problem. Less tolerance implies less trade and less trade implies little or no lessening of intolerance. Inter border trade also means more tolerance for other cultures. Television plays extra-ordinary role in this. They sell us HBO, CNN etc., and the mindset becomes more global, more tolerant.
So, to sum up, inter border trade is more important than a layman thinks it to be.
I am feeling compulsive to digress here a little and say that tolerance has been a prominent virtue of Hindus since ages. Dravidian Hindus lived Aryans into the nation. Hindus then took mughals into the nation. Hindu culture does not need u to carry your religion on your foreheads. There is not a thing in this religion that u refuse to do and be called an unrespecting hindu. If u don’t bathe in Ganga at Haridwar or don’t smear your forehead with tilak or don’t go to Vaishno-Devi or don’t wear thread round your torso or pray to Ram and Krishna every morning, you still can be a Hindu without problems. This is the kind of tolerance Hinduism has and this kind of tolerance is the forte of Hinduism. The same thing definitely has a hand in the fact that Hindus are considered one of the best brains in the world because the brains develop in freedom only and not in boundaries. I say this as a third party since I believe that being a Hindu is just a matter of chance for me or anyone; and I can still admire this religion as a third party and loathe the fanatic RSS, VHP types in the same manner. The arguments above also apply to other more tolerant religions like the present day Catholics.
In my next post, we will move on from here and talk about market. What kind of market is necessary for a country? Is the capitalistic market the way to go after the Russia debacle? Is the public sector really required in India? And may be in the subsequent post, we will look into the foreign investments in India. What kind of investment is happening in India? What is good for us and what is not? Till then, have a nice time
Beware of the dog inside !
I remember the day when IIT result was to be declared. I was asleep in the morning and my dad was already at IIT Delhi surfing the result charts. A friend of mine’s dad jumped so hard on his son getting through, that he nearly fall off the sofa he was sitting on. And we knew that it had just started. The adulations from friends and relatives continues even till now. Then Chetan Bahagat said once that nearly all IITians get really beautiful wives. Very true.
What I was wondering is about the righteousness off all this.
I have seen fathers listening more to their sons, relatives jumping ahead to say ‘wah wah’, even if their ‘only IITian in the family’ is yet to start speaking, and that too not on electronics or computers, on anything, from gandhi’s relevance today to ethical aspects of sexy movies..anything.
What can be the reason for this? Probably they are assumed to have more ‘intelligence’. One friend said, “obviously yaar! Our analytical powers…that is it..that is why….We are so good at analysing problems and coming out with solutions…”.
You will agree that intellignece is not about passing exams. Everyone reads against dowry in school. “Exchange of gifts” is rampant in marriages. I have seen innumerable IITians swearing that they will not go for inter-caste marriages because there parents will not allow. But are not we being educated to to be wise enough to understand right and wrong? We have been taught in schhol against dowry, against castism, and even the best brains are not able to stand against it. We clear classes with best ranks throughout our schooling, we clear the toughest exam of the country, but we do not actually apply such basic values in life, then are not all these ranks and all these JEEs a waste?
No doubts that the education system in India is rotten, no values are taught in schools. I remember writing film stories in moral science papers in school time. We obtain most values from our parents and clearing JEE or AIIMS doesn’t guarranty that we learned those lessons nicely.
Consider a guy who has produced startling results in academics throughout. India is a competetive place and he would have worked like anything to do that. Most probably he would have had to sacrifice a lot, would have not played much, travelled much. In all, he would have done much a less of things which normally boys of his age do. In other words, the probability of his being abnormal is high. Even the IITians will agree that many DR1s are abnormal. If there was an abnormality meter, sometimes I think that a random sample from IIT will score more than a similar sample from, say DU, please excuse the technical terms. Let us talk about our ‘result producing’ guy a little more. such guys, before coming to IIT, generally have less formed views about nearly everything. It is bound to be this way beacuse af all the time spent with the school books. But after IIT, they know they are a brand. Now they have a take on everything. They talk on all the matters and with such confidence. Oh yes they have the analytical powers, and reasons are built for every view and argument of theirs very analytically, be it right, wrong, preposterous…whatever. For example, one of my IITian friend one day, started trying to explain me the virtues of nepotism. And let me tell you, he argues good. I sent one of my blogs to a fellow IITian. I doubt how much he could make out of that , but his reply was…”hmm.., ur vocab is catching up with mine man..keep it up! ” . And people listen. I am sure others who read his comment must have suddenly started thinking high of my vocab., and as might be the intention, of his too. What to note is that the attitude becomes as of demigods.
What vice is not a spreciality of IITians. Daaru, grass, prostitution. And people still jump for IITians for their girls. One IITian, I heard, was a practising pimp. Every year or two you listen about bike accident cases of highly drunk passed out alumni.
It is certainly not the case that you don’t find great guys in IITs. Those who are, they are really great. All I want to say is that in many cases, this IIT tag is too blinding. Blinding, alarmingly to the world outside and in many cases, to the IITians themselves too. I don’t think many IITians think of themselves more as engineers and less as IITians. As engineers, though, some of us have proven IITians to be supreme, but as humans, for many of us, there is still an everest to climb.
Don’t rang it that basanti …
I have had my own confusions about my attachments with my country in the past and patriotism is in the air now a days…so thought of writing something. I also think blogging is infectious and want to warn my friends about it. so…here we go…
I have a close friend.One of the dearest to me and highly gifted intellectually. In a chat the other day, he said he feels being wasted working in a company in india. He is working for an MNC but has the brains much beyond required there. I suggeted a phd because where I am working now a days, the prof has millions to spend in research and he does what he is interested in. ofcourse this is not india I am talkinng about. My friend, I will call him “brainy” from now on, said that it’s too easy to manage an already flying ship, but the challenge is in fixing the broken ship and to make it fly. So he will try to manage things in India only.
Another friend of mine, let’s call her “Rice” (she is a good cook), did her BS from US and is workng there. In a recent chat, her wish to return to india transpired. She has a fine job but her problem is that she misses india and she misses the family. With the job, she goes in the morning, comes in the evening to no one waiting for her and feels bad about that. I know what it feels like, mine is the same story now a days and I hate it more than anything. To make things worse, she saw rang de basanti and got emotional…you know girls..they get emotional..
Another friend of mine, “Troubli” had an LOC case. She is hindu gupta and the guy is muslim. Girl’s father wont let it happen. The relationship is long over and once i had a chance of an argument with the father. He is his own kind of patriot and says india is for hindus because the others came to india later, and we were already there and bla bla.
As the heading says, this blog has my personal views, the rest is going to be just that. After the chat with Brainy when he was worrying about the ship, I thought may be he should go to bangladesh.( Though I hate using analogies in arguments, but it gets interesting here) Because the ship doesnt need fixing there. It is altogether sunk, or should i say scuttled. He can surely find a bigger challenge there if it as all about the challenge. Or may be he should go to philippines. The ship is most of the time hijacked there. He can have most challenging time flying the ship there. I really dont think it is about the challenge he is worried about. I think that the reason of his was wrong.
I am presently in zurich and haven’t yet met a soul who is not more than nice to me. The city is a haven. Crime rate is zilch, weather is fine and let me tell u,the girls are awesome. And daily i read the hindustan times epaper, the Left creating chaos in everything even remotely connected to development, then there was this case in meerut where couples were beaten up for being couples. In zurich you dont pass an hour without seeing a couple kissing each other in public. The thing to notice is the way others look at them. Most of them pass a smile, as if to show that they are feeling good in watching that the two kissers are that happy. Let me make it clear that even as I say all this, I have no intention of settling anywhere other than india. we will come to why, later. So when Rice was telling me that she wants to move back to india and reiterated again and again that india has her roots , i reminded her of all the newspaper articles I had read, the VHP, the Modis and the Advanis, the left and all..and asked her to make an informed decision, rather than an emotional one. And the ‘roots’ reason in also interesting. Did i choose the roots? and by chance, if i were born in pakistan, would i want to be there just because it has my roots ? I really really do not think so. If I am frustrated, if I feel wasted, I will have to rush out. My point is, I should and there’s no vice in that.
Lastly we come to Troubli’s dad. Now, I asked him that if india belongs to hindus, then to which hindus? Because before the aryans came, there were dravidians only. now if some day dravidians start saying that india is theirs because others came from outside, then where would he like to go? China? Aryans probably came from there. The only answer he had was that the situation is too hypothetical. Also, what is the guarranty, that my last fifty or more forefathers were all born in the same geographical area known as India today. Just in case, I realise today that my father was someone else and was not actually from India, then after some odd 24 years of my close friendships in India, my hooting for India in all kinds of sports, my attachments with my teachers here, my craze for bollywood etc., would I suddenly be any less of an Indian. That’s simply preposterous. Whose country is it anyway?
The common thing in all above anecdotes is the struggle to come in terms with the ‘patriotism’. Who is a patriot and who is not? None of these guys have a definition for patriotism and still are struggling to practice it. Here’s my try at it. In campus I had the honour of doing a presentation on “What is a nation ?” by Ernest Renan (this name is the true one, don’t worry), and is a must read. In the article, he refutes the ideas such as a nation must have common language or a common relegion, or common this or common that. He does this beautifully and I am not going to repeat it here. Renan ends the article by declaring that nationality is a sense of common history, common experiences and hence a will to live together because of these commonalities. America was not there at the time of article and hence now we can say that even if you don’t have a long common history, you can be proud of your country, and as proud as americans are. So my take on this, then, was as follows. We love are country because we are born here and hence have spent lot of time here. Have you ever had pets? You take a pet, keep it for two months and you feel attached to it. You enter a class in school, and in an interclass competition, you feel attached to ur class and to no other class. Same in interschool competitions and all. So my point is that nationalism is similar only, and nothing more. (‘nothing more’ is important). This is human nature, to develop belongingness wherever we develop contacts. I bet that if u living in washington for some time now, and there is washington Vs newyork, u will shout for washington. I want to settle in india because I have friends and family there and also that I am attached to the place, I have a sense of belonging to it. But…..i will come to this but later.
The most important thing in the above argument is ‘I’ instead of the nation as whole. I is dominant in the reasons. not India, not us. “Brainy” should not think that he has to get himself wasted for the ship. Because there is another important sense of belonging, and that is to “his capabilities”. You have to nurture it too. You must. I am not telling you what to do but i am telling you that it is nothing but one of the innumerable ’senses of belongingness’ you have on stake. You have to choose and that is all to it. Gandhi did the same in South africa what he did here. Rice is wrong about the roots argument and must rethink why she is doing what.Troubli’s dad is a case gone too wrong and unfortunately too much into his system.
Patriotism as a group activity is a flawed concept and mostly is interpreted wrongly. It is too hyped up in my nation and the ‘but….’ I left unattended says that I will be in india for myself only. “Patriotism” is my obligation to myself and to noone else. And so is my urge to do what I feel I can. And I will choose…and that I will choose patriotim or anything similar, is definitely not obvious. Why should it be? The choice is personal for everyone and no choice is vile or over honourable. It all depends on the “I”.
