On Sat 9 November , we watched from Lahore and New Delhi , two events unfolding with a radically different set of eyes i.e. the inauguration of Kartarpur corridor and the Indian SC decision to build a temple on disputed Ayodhya site while an alternative land provided for a mosque. Not a greater and yawning gulf was possible in the views of many people across the border though a majority of them is in favour of peace and mutual coexistence. This difference could be gauged if one was watching the TV Channels broadcasting from both India and Pakistan. It is a huge communication gap indeed.
The chief reason behind it is our received, cultivated and sometimes indoctrinated idea of love. It may appear shocking to many readers that the great emotion of love is being blamed for these acts of mutual difference and hatred but it is something like this indeed.
Most of the problems we ascribe to hatred are the product of our love for certain people, ideas or belief systems. So much so that in democracies, voting mindlessly for some arresting personage without caring for his/her internal thought takes place takes place owing to our infatuation with his patrician features or seductive words.
In addition to bloody wars, the gruesome murders we witness around are instigated by a morbid feeling of love many times. The emotion of love is immensely strong hence people with dominant interests exploit it. They appeal to the impressionable feelings of people from the early youth to sacrifice everything , even their children, mother , father for the sake of love for this heroic figure or that ideology. People are like children, they have been indoctrinated through their crude emotions of love to do some of the most horrible things in history. What good is the love that creates hatred for one thousand and one people, places and thoughts.
Most of the problems we ascribe to hatred are the product of our love for certain people, ideas or belief systems. So much so that in democracies, voting mindlessly for some arresting personage without caring for his/her internal thought takes place takes place owing to our infatuation with his patrician features or seductive words
We take certain concepts for granted and believe in them as if they are the same always. The most prominent among them is love; love , whatever its nature, and regardless of its sadistic and masochistic tendencies. More alarmingly both dogma and love are bereft of reason, hence a lover just like a fanatic will never entertain any argument howsoever sound. Some fool of course said , “every thing is fair in love and war.” And no doubt we tried to discourage this thought by making a large number of pacts about war and its laws but we never gave a serious thought to an unbridled and blind love that creates these wars.
Writing something against love (whatever its nature) seems quite eccentric but we are to travel on this uncharted territory and that not to frustrate love rather to reinvent it in such a thoughtful and decent fashion that it may not be misled to create violence, rather prove to be what the love is for.
In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates recounts the doctrine of Eros (love) imparted to him by the wise woman Diotima. She bids us not to linger in the love evoked by the beauty in a single human body, but to mount up as by a stair ” from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms.” Then up from beauty of body to the beauty of mind, until we arrive at final contemplation of the idea of “beauty absolute, separate, simple and everlasting.” We should aim at a school state that may re-educate the people to love, love without any bias, without any boundary, all the humanity, all the phenomena of life, all the planet and all the universe.
The writer is a freelancer