Sunday, October 11, 2009

Love Thesis Part 1

Part 1 coz this is one topic on which opinions evolve(read differ) with time. So I am sure that many more sequels will follow.


It haunts me day and night...Every moment...Everything in sight.....Its a sweet agony I put myself through...In case you're wondering what the bloody hell I am talking about...its memories....my bittersweet memories. Love is a strange emotion and I am beginning to believe it as with the progress of time, love reveals many of its hidden facets one by one.
I once heard in some movie that you are only as happy as you choose to be; or was that you end up with the exact partner that you wish to have...hmmm (am confused..lol)..oh I got it...the line was and I quote " Every woman has the exact love life she wants" and I distinctly remember my reaction to it too and I quote " Bull Shit " :)
Nobody wants to be miserable or lonely or trapped or all the other words that are not spelled H-A-P-P-Y or be defined as deliriously delighted or....you get the picture don't you! We'll talk more about this subsequently.

There I was, a year ago, on a Saturday night, in a basement apartment at Carriage Hill Dr, with my roomies watching 1920 and drinking cha (not me....them); After the movie, we started talking about various things...God, Religion, Rabindranath Tagore.......and Love. One of my roomies, Mohor, started telling us about this incident that happened few years ago. A bengali girl and a bengali boy in love but from different castes. They went around for few years and then suddenly the guy steps back saying that his parents will never agree to an intercaste alliance (In today's day and age in educated families??? Well yes it happens but it is very easily walked around by the educated youth in metropolitan cities). The ever famous " I can't marry you but I will never marry anyone else either" or in this case it must be said " ami kokhono biye korbo na". The girl ofcourse was heartbroken and it took her a long time (few years) to collect herself and try to move on. She did bump into that guy at some later point to come to know that he fell in love and married a punjabi from Delhi. What was she supposed to infer? Did the guy just use his parents as an excuse to move away? Possible! It also could be that he dint find it in him to fight for this girl? Probable I say! A friend once told me that if a guy really wants a girl he will do anything to get her...So whom he wanted was evident wasnt it? But is the answer any consolation for the girl? Speculate!

We moved on to discuss a book "Bengal Nights" by world renowned Mircea Eliade and "It Does Not Die" by Maitreyi Devi. The names are english translations for "La nuit Bengale" (French) and "Na Hanyate" (Bengali) respectively. Both the books are semiautobiographical novels which details the passionate love affair of Alain, a young French engineer, and Maitreyi, the daughter of his Indian employer.

These books are commonly called the His and Her versions as they both are different projections of the same story. Their love story. This was later made into the movie that we know as "Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam".  Here the Maitreyi was forced to leave Alain and marry an Indian doctor and every shred of evidence that Alain ever existed was destroyed including the tree Alain had planted in their household. It was as if Alain never came into their lives. These books make an interesting read for many reasons, apart from the story, one of which being the different points of view of the same story by the two genders involved in it. Broken heart and unfulfilled love made Mircea brush of the love story of his life as a purely physical relationship which ended at a point. He never could understand how Maitreyi Devi could forget their love, buckle under her parents and marry someone else and lead a normal life with kids and the daily chaos while he remained alone all his life in her wake. But being an Indian girl where family held the most power and the times were not so modern, she had two options :1) To run away with Mircea and watch her family die in shame 2) Forget her dreams and save her family. She gave up Mircea alright but put up a brave fight for a very long time against the arranged marriage. Only emotional blackmail could yeild the desired results finally.


What in life would equate to circumstances beyond your control and circumstances you just did not have the balls to fight around (or consider it worthy to fight for)? Clearly the second story was circumstances beyond control; 60 years past, in orthodox India, even Mircea being a guy could not fight and was driven away back to his country; so what could a girl do? But the first story, set in present India had much more chances to succeed but clearly the boy had not felt it worthy to fight for the girl in question which he undoubtedly did for the next one.


So two different love stories with a difference of 60 years or so spanning between them.....now tell me friends, how do I equate the line "Every woman has the exact love life that she wants" in these two situations? Do you think they got what they wanted?


More to follow
~ K

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