Love's Fable Lost in Springtime Sale

Feb 21, 2004, 12.00am IST
A Srinivas.

Spring's in the air and it's time for love and flowers to bloom. Teenagers serenade each other on boulevards and in parks. But are the celebrations an outpouring of love or a mere affectation of it? In the lambent light of spring, there is a suspicion of shadow in the soul. We are a lonely lot; deep down, a spring morning can seem a day's burden.


Our outer gaiety conceals an inner expanse of grey. We speak of all the problems of the world but not of our anguish, our manifest inability to receive and radiate love. As a result, a creeping neurosis is becoming the norm rather than the exception. Unsure of acceptance, we tend to retreat into a hard, sullen narcissism. Our insecurity forces us into acquisitive, unloving behaviour patterns. Love is the most fundamental urge in a human being — the urge to feel close not just in an erotic sense, but crucially in a filial and general way. Psychologist Eric Fromm points out that a generalised ‘brotherly love' forms the basis of all compassion, if not a rational spiritualism.


Fromm details respect, res-ponsibility, care and know-ledge as the essentials of love between equals. But for this to happen, individuals would have to grow up to evolve with complete awareness of themselves and love their existence. But doesn't modern society splinter existence and destroy holism? The love of gnarled souls, filled with misgivings towards life, is likely to be less than convincing.

Modern society manufactures neurotics as it does consumer items, creating more repressed, atomised individuals than Sigmund Freud visualised. As Fromm observes, a market-oriented society creates homogeneous people with predictable wants and attitudes, therefore their inner self remains undeveloped and unduly self-centred. Fromm and Hans Sullivan also sought to dispel the Freudian fallacy that love was a product of sexual instinct. In a consumer society, the two are evidently poles apart. We amputate erotic love from parental love and brotherly love, as though erotic love was meant to survive in fetid isolation. Mystics inform us that phy-sical intimacy is a transient phenomenon, its need seeming all the more intense in a loveless, alienated society.

The market and malls choose to define love for us. The celluloid Raj Kapoor would have never met his Valentine today, because he would have been too poor to take her out to dinner or buy her an expensive lipstick. The rays of ‘love', as socio-logist Peter Berger observes, are refracted through a prism on class and culture, but never has this become as apparent as it has today with the market laying the ground rules.

An individual outside this orbit of social-ly well-defined behaviour faces failure in love, or he could turn neurotic. He lacks the class-culture credentials and therefore the suave confidence of a Shah Rukh Khan in Kal Ho Naa Ho. Gauri and Baiju in Baiju Bawra simply do not fit the bill. That was unglamorous, pre-Valentine love. The effervescence of cola is enough to shut out their chemistry.


Today's Valentines, for all their ‘happiness', betray fear in their eyes. They know little of brotherly love, still less of love for God. What passes in the name of religiosity today is mere bi-gotry. They, poor souls, might scarcely know who they are, where they are and what they are doing. Life is a pacy film without substance, and love, a mere kit-kat break.

Can the spirit of St Valentine thrive in a world where desire is manipulated at will? Love, as Faiz Ahmad Faiz would have said, is the domain of the maverick and non-conforming dreamer, the offspring of pluck and real individualism. It would survive best in the garden of spiritual stillness, not in the sumptuous sets of a Karan Johar film.