Love is Dead

Love is basically give and take-as much as you can give and as much as I can take. Love is giving all you have without expecting anything in return. Love is its own reward. No longer true. No sooner love is institutionalized into marriage or turned into a lover-mistress relationship, it is devalued into a contract between partners as in business and therefore business moves govern their relationships. Each tries to extract as much as he or she can and give as little in return as possible. They develop a “ledger psychology” balancing what they have given against what they have received with a view to making a net profit for themselves.

Love has fallen victim to the changed values of society. It was based on trust and now no one trusts any one. Distrust is so wide spread that love has withered to lifelessness. A society in which corruption is rampart generates a climate of pervasive deception. When you hear of the million made by politicians and black marketers, you don’t feel uneasy filling your tax returns, indulge on a little cheating with the customs and smuggles in camera, watch, a transistor an extra bottle of whisky. Soon this cheating mentally transfer to persona relationships and you think a little  lying to your husband, wife or sweet heart will do no harm you become more self-entered, more reluctant to deny yourself anything and justify it as, “I owe it to myself.

Distrust is learnt from experience. When somebody you have trusted lets you down, you begin to distrust everyone else. It is a kind of personalized Pearl Harbor experience. All of us have experienced Pearl Harbors in our lives.

Most adulterous affairs takes place not because the marriage is unhappy but because a safe opportunity to commit adultery becomes irresistible. When an opportunity to have a fling with little danger of discovery presents itself the vast majority of adults male and female will avail of it. The choice before them at the time is between a transitory sense of guilt and letting go to the opportunity that may not come again and feeling stupid afterwards. Most people prefer not to feel stupid.

Fate often brings together people who had no intentions of falling in love with each other. Two parallel lines heading for infinity. Two soul’s straight as a die and from a respectable home. They did not want to intersect until their death; this was their secret pride and joy.

Deprivation & Disparities

India has failed miserably in its efforts to alleviate poverty and create a more equal society. The Arjun Sengupta committee concluded that 77% of Indians live on less than Rs 20 a day. According to Global Hunger index complied by international food policy research institute, India ranks 67 among 88 developing countries.

It is high time that India introduced effective measures to abolish extreme forms of deprivations reduces gross disparities and provide a level playing field to the wretched of the land. In the first two decades of independence it was hoped that the implementation of land reforms measures would transform the agrarian structures release the production energies of peasantry and usher in an egalitarian social order land reforms failed to achieve the objective set out in the five year plans.

In second five year plan India launched a well thought out community Development programme aimed at the all round development of villages. The programme collapsed because of mismanagement. The framers of sixth, five year, plan correctly identified three cardinal factures of India planning these were:-

1.      Failure to achieve full employment.

2.      Failure to eradicate poverty.

3.      Failure to create a more equal society.

The only feasible approach is to augment employment opportunities, provide easy access to quality school education and health care and operate a universal public distribution system guaranteeing monthly supply of food grains at subsidized price to the poor. The three new measures capable of making a dent on poverty are:-

1.      NREGA (Now MGNREGA)

2.      Right to Educate Act.

3.      Right to food legislation Act.

Further suggestions are:-

1.      Improve access to the disadvantaged Sections of the population to quality school education.

2.      Expand & reorient the NERGA.

3.      Provide for universal entitlement to cereals and the other components of a food basket.

Government is a thing that guides and if need be compels.

What is Love

Love is like life; once switched off nothing will bring it back. Love is “an obsessive, all-embracing passion for another person that strikes seemingly from no where and makes life a hell of uncertainty, punctuated by brief moments of ecstasy”. The urge between two people of opposite sexes is without doubt physical because it usually manifests itself on the approach to puberty. It is also often entirely a yearning of the body without any mental or emotional over tones. Both male and female pass through such a period when compulsions of the body are so explosive that they will seek their fulfillment through the most readily available persons without the slightest affection for them. This is lust not love.

Love is more subtle than lust and while lust can be fulfilled by expending the lust, love has more frustration than fulfillment. Most people fall in love with people very much like themselves. There is a strong element of narcissism in a person’s choice. It has been noticed that many couples in love resemble each other like brother and sister. But as often, a couple totally unlike each other in their physical make up is strongly drawn towards each other. This is the negative aspect of narcissism.

Love is initially stirred by physical attraction and is born in the eye. It is on the physical that the emotional and mental relationship is built. The emotional is frequently reinforced by appeals which are essentially physical. Love is not man’s quest for an idealized Helen. It is elevating a girl who is available to Hellenistic height. That is why men do not roam the world looking for the girl of their dreams but weave them around the girl next door. She is there, others are not. In love people get what they deserve. However idealized the love may become its consumption is in the act of sex.

Whoever loves, if he does not propose?

The right true end of love, he’s one that goes

To sea for nothing, but to make him sick.

The romantic edifice of love has to have sex as its foundation stone. Once that is gone love becomes something else; companionship, friendship or whatever else. The circumstance in which a couple meets each other often compels them to fall in love. The same couple in a different setting might not even notice each other.

A man in an excitable state is amore prone to fall in love than when he is calm and placid. Apparently, excitement causes chemical changes in his blood and brain vessels which make him more receptive to emotional stimuli. High altitude brings about similar effects. Hence there is high incidence of marriage between air hostesses and passengers.

Speaking from personal experience I can say that all this theorizing about love is hog wash. People fall in and out of love all the time in all kinds of places and make the most impossible combinations. There is nothing exclusive about love because people can be in love with varying of intensity with many people at the same time. I do not know if other people suffer anguish. When they are rejected; I have an exhilarant sense of release.

There was young man who was famed among

The lovers, and was for his deeds renowned.

His name was momin, faith idolatry,

The worship of idols being his sole concern,

No thoughts he gave to world of religion,

But cared for lovely ladies charm alone

He spent his time in leisure, love and joy.

Lost in life’s pleasure night and day

Foe ever happy, gay and drunk on hope,

For even smiling like an open bud;

Green like the flask of wine laughing when

The sparking liquid is poured into the cup

                                                    ----Momin (d.1851)

I am a lover of breast

Like pomegranates;

Plant them no other tress

On my grave but these

                                          ---- Lucknowi, Nasikh

Whenever a bubble

By another bubble rose         

I thought of her brassiere

Of finest gauze.

                                     ----- Atish

No Sex, We are Indians

No people in the world are more confused in their attitude towards sex than we Indians. Lands of phallus- yoni worshipers laud the virtues of virginal chastity, renunciation of sex and brahmacharya.

The Indian woman as a sexual object is vilely abused. Manu reviled her as lusty, unreliable unfaithful and with as insatiable appetite for sex.

When kissing is forbidden, how is it that rape remains a staple feature of Indian films? It is because humiliation of women is an integral part of the Indian male fantasy of love. So, we have evolved three kinds of lovers; Majnu’s, Krishna’s and the latest; Sharukh Khan-who is “good bad hero, neither overtly emotional like majnu nor boyishly phallic like the Krishna Lover. In turn he has bred a new brand of heroine, “a masculine feminine girl” the Kumari as the tom boy.

The sari is both a very ornamental as well as functioned dress. Properly draped, it can accentual the contours of the female form giving a special roundness to buttocks. A well cut blouse worn with the sari elevates the bosom and exposes the belly to below the navel. There is no other form of female attire which can both conceal physical short comings of the wearer as well as expose what deserves exposure. A fat woman looks less fat in a sari than she would be in a dress and then women looks more filled in. at the same time sari is very functional. All a woman has to do when she wants to urinate or defecate is to lift it to her waist. When required to engage in a quick sexual inter course, she needs to do no more than draw it up a little and open her lights.

To most newlywed Indian couples, the concept of privacy is as alien as that of love. They rarely get a room to themselves; the bride-wife sleeps with other women members of her husband’s family the husband shares his charpoy (cots) lined alongside his fathers and brothers. Occasionally the mother-in-law, anxious to acquire a grandson will contrive a meeting between her son and his wife. The most common technique is to get her to take a tumbler of milk to the lad when male member are elsewhere. The lad grabs the choice for the “quickie”. Hardly ever do the couple get enough time for a prolonged and satisfying bout of intercourse. Most Indians men are not even aware that women also have orgasms; most Indian women share this ignorance because although they go from one pregnancy to another, they have no idea that sex can be pleasurable. This is a sad commentary on the people of a country which produced the most widely read treatise on the art of sex, Kama Sutra and evaluated the act of sex to spiritual sublimity by explicit depictions on its temples.

My Experiments with Body

He who has health has hope; he who has hope has everything. Everyone should be his own physician. I had always believed in strenuous exercise. I have no patience with yoga which I found very boring. Besides exertion which does not make me sweat out the poison in my system and leave me pleasantly exhausted was not my concept of exercise.

Sada rahe kanehan,…..Kaya

Kal noa kabhoon byapai

(let you body be like burnished gold

No ill will ever befall it)

Indians in their forties should be particularly careful with their bodies. The burden of the country rests heavily on the shoulders of the university, educated and the affluent who form a very small proportion of the population of the country. It is in the forties that they usually come to the top of their profession or other businesses. And it is in the forties that they begin to indulge themselves in more food and drink than is necessary for them; keep indifferent hours, take less exercise and usually begin, to suffer from ailments like ulcers, piles, high bold pressure etc. which take a heavy toll of their efficiency and eventually kill them. It is in the forties and the fifties that they must, if they have not learnt before, control their diet and exercise.

A rich man who wants to be healthy must learn to like a poor man. If they do not so they will only murder themselves and be guilty of homicide in the second degree. A simple rule for diet; one third of the stomach should have food, one third drink and the remaining third should be empty. A secret for youthful validity, “take a little exercise”. It takes not more than a few seconds twice a day. you do it, you’ll remain fit all your life”. “At lunch and at dinner when I am offered a second helping. I waggle my head to indicate, no”.

It is better to prepare your own menu- keeping in mind that it must ensure regular easy evacuation. A constipated stomach is an invitation to disease. People who spend most of the time watching their health have  little time to enjoy it. Concern with health should not become an obsession and there should be a certain amount of calculated carelessness about it. But it cannot be argued that it must take top priority in every one’s scale of values.

The best three doctors in the world, you yourself must watch your food, teach yourself the art of quiet solitude and cheerfulness with follow as the night the day.