The Decayed Romance !

At the very outset, I shall borrow the words of Khalil Gibran, the famous American-Lebanese poet - "One day you will ask me which is more important ? My life or yours ? I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life."

‘Shiv’ is a binomial entity. Binomial for it is equally fascinating both in mythology and modernity. Etymologically, it stands as an embodiment of auspiciousness, more befittingly a subject of passionate romance. It manifests itself in a form as abstract and perhaps as controversial as romance – the form we all worship – which is the linga or the Shivlinga. Controversy is an indispensable part of Modernity. And this controversial modernity engenders a romance of different kind in me– a sublime one embodying a set of new philosophies, ontologies and epistemologies. This ecological Cybernetics gives you a chance to taste all the new eclectic set of ideas.

The very idea of romance is omni-present. Its power is invincible. It journeys from an embryo to adulthood, through different lanes of time. It presents a fantastic ontogeny. But love demands sophistication; lest it can lethally insidious. Gone are those days when romance used to be a symbol of pristineness, a celebration of oneness, a bond of sacrifice, an exercise of passion and a mirror of pain. The cloistered passion of Radha-Krishna is an epitome. Mira’s love exemplifies her unconditional, painful longing and perseverance for Lord Shri Krishna. Sarada Maa inspires us with her renunciation of worldly pleasures to be one with the eccentric mystic - Sri Ramakrishna Paramhansa. Mythology, truly, had invented the sanctity, the piousness of romance.

Modernity has imitated it to give birth to an objective romance. A romance which identifies you only with a purpose. In this epoch, complexity has outlived simplicity, lust has overtaken suprasensibility and imitation has murdered the innocence of love. Parameters of judging today’s romance have changed its colour to puzzle the justice of love. Modern beauty is superficial beauty, it is material beauty, only skin deep and it is merely a powdered beauty. Remember you can powder a surface to look artificially pretty; not any inner part. And humankind, anyways, offer you with only the few types of pure blood and flesh in it – very little to decorate and adulterate. Today, romance has become by far the most competitive and evanescent; akin to an instant Samadhi crash-course workshop of the West; teaching you nothing more than the art of kissing the futileness.

Gandhi, the heroic saint of the India’s independence, confesses in his autobiography, the lust that gripped him in his youthful days. The lust orphaned him of seeing, despite being the most dutiful and religious son, his father’s last breath. For he was hijacked to an abyss of desires, sensuality, fornication with his wife. Not only this, the very first child to Kasturbai died three days after its birth, which Gandhi attributes and laments owing to his youthful lust. Worse today romance is a comedy, a joke of two fluctuating identities.

I wish I could talk to the apparent innocence of this romance, talk to its eyes; perhaps know its changing needs. For I still find a faint essence of this divinity around me. I see it in the Orient, especially India, in the unconditional, oblivious, unbiased, painstaking love of its mothers for the neonatals. I feel it in music, another sublime refugee of this romance, which connects you potentially with the Supreme. I sense it in spirituality, which if practiced religiously, helps establish a wonderful oneness with you inner-being. I wish I could be a party to the innocence of a little boy; penurious, hungry, tired at the day’s end; holding onto his wage-worker father’s hand.

I will conclude with the words of Swami Vivekananda that – “Humans have infinite desires; They must learn the power to control it.” Nothing today can make a person happy. Man has become completely material. In fact, emotions, like romance, have got biased and purposeful. We must exercise, for the sake of real happiness in our lives, the power of detachment along with that of attachment – be it with any material or emotion. Because attachment beyond a degree brings in calamitous sorrow and pain. Let us learn to romance with the divine gift of romance. Let us preserve and practice its sanctity, piousness, purity, sanguiness, susnato from the modernity of Death.

--
Susnato Lahiri


References:-
1. Intimate Relations, Sudhir Kakar Penguin India, 1989
2. Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, John M Ross and Sudhir Kakar, OUP 1986
3. Ramakrishna Parahamansa – A psychological profile, N Sil, New York Publications
4. Complete works of Swami Vivekananda, Advaita Ashram, Calcutta
5. First Love, Last Rites, Namita Devidayal (e-Article)