The Journey of Love

A movie with no hope in the beginning turns out to be the trigger for this post or write-up or article (depending upon where I tend to publish this). The name is Pyaar prema kadhal (meaning love in all the languages); Like an elixir churned out from the magical pot, love never ceases to amaze us, even after turning out to be the concept of at least a hundred thousand movies, worldwide.

So how did love survive through various periods, from the stone age through the king’s rule and the renaissance era to the modern world, we now inhabit-ate? 

How did we discover its sheer magic or invent its vast potential?

What were the sacrifices we had to pay to alter its course through the carved out path, which we later named as culture?

What made us to classify the people which are the roots of the evil of our present system?(Rich-poor, caste, Religion, Region, Race, Nation, even Gender!)

The law of the majority - isn't it a curse?

Now lets take a detour of an imaginary world, thousands of years back. We were the free folks. We were the nomads. We were the cave men. We hunted down animals. We ate them raw and later cooked after the advent of fire. We liked some people and hated some. We loved some without knowing what it is. We discovered the greatest discovery of all time - Sex and Pro-creation. So we found a way to enrich our future generation with progeny, obviously, without knowing what we were doing by then. The first of its kind would had been either a comedy or a disaster to watch! So we mated with our opposite gender. I am sure, homosexuals would have existed back then, but their plight is surely thrown out of light.(Which can make up for a separate post, later)

So cave men(We) were polygamous, naturally. So we mated with whomever we liked. Maybe we learnt from our animal friends about how to choose our mates (usually a fight results - a trend we even copy now; not to mention, a plot for thousands of movies and books). We didn’t have to check our backgrounds of caste, religion, region(maybe yes, even back then) , status( there was no money invented by then); If we liked, we moved together and had it. Period.

So, how did we end up in marriage?


                       

Being free folks, we didn't have any rules to abide. We lived as we wished. There were no careers to think of; no money to earn; We had to live mainly for our food. And safety from the wild animals possibly.  So we stopped from being a forager or a cave men. We fell prey to the agriculture and settled in a place and called it our home. Now a home needs people to fill in with. So we chose the people to live with and called it marriage. Monogamous unions developed in tandem with sedentary agriculture, helping to preserve the land and property within the same narrow kin group. This was possibly decided by a few village head men discussing about the pros and cons, in detail. So, the law of the land changed in various places. Some regions permitted it; some disallowed it; some even criminalized it with punishments;

So, we the free folks were trapped by this agriculture and later by marriage. But it did bring in some regularity in our way of living. But all through the history, we have fallen prey to the “law of the majority”. This is just one such instance. 

Agriculture paved way to many more evils. It classified us into laborers and landlords; low and high caste/borns; poor and rich; the slaves and the rulers; 

We were made to think of our own clans and castes, in choosing our mates. What was once a natural tendency or urge to get attracted to someone, was institutionalized by the term marriage. This is what rules and laws have brought to our natural order. Isn't that ridiculous?

Those who stood up against this evil paid with their blood. And we still continue the bloodshed, even thousands of years ahead, reeling in the technological realms.

So the word “love” was taken out of the dictionary  of marriage. We were forced to love and call it love. We were made to believe in fairy tales and “forever ever afters”. It was after all a good business worth billions( thanks to the money that had been invented by then).

                         

So the purpose of marriage was to pro-create your family and get lost in the maze of raising your children. This was brain-fed to all children. Some liked it. Some were built for it. Definitely some didn’t. So unhappiness arose out of nothingness.

So, now we have to ward of this unhappiness and so we formulated a new plan - divorce( again by a group of elite people). And as they say, the rest is history!

The divorce rates skyrocketed through the roofs. And we started re-thinking about the purpose.

We placed our hopes in LOVE as the purpose of marriage. So we re-named and re-structured our older concept of our forager-cave men as “LOVE MARRIAGE”. This was a rebel idea to the order of the state. Rebels are the minority and the state is the majority. And rebels always pay by their blood. 

Depending upon our beliefs in Love or arranged marriage, the families were labelled as Orthodox/ conservative/ traditional or modern! Ironically this might seem a joke, because the orthodox/conservative/traditional people don't like the cave men ideology, which is in fact the real traditional idea.

So were we happy with the Love marriage? Some were. Some weren’t. The divorce rates were equally dissipated which is evident that both the arranged and love marriages had some glitches. Maybe both were a failure? We can’t completely be unjust to those chasing the “happily living ever after” dreams. We shouldn't discourage them to pursue their dreams. They shall fall and learn, on their own. 
                         

So began the debate that love definitely has changed before and after marriage. So what do we do? The rationalists thought of killing the culprit - the marriage! So if we are really compatible with each other, we need to get along with each other before falling together into the ditch. 

Thus began this experimental idea of LIVE-IN together, which basically erases the idea and fears of marriage and let love take its natural course between two individuals. This is like buying LOVE, the freedom, from the institution of marriage. 

Many people wont and shall not understand this concept and defend their brain-fried traditional ideas in the name of culture and values. But what is culture? It is nothing but a way of living imposed on us by the ancestors citing their ancestors. If you trace them back further, we shall be in square one.
  
                            

What the people need to understand is that LIVE-IN together now stands in the same place where, once MARRIAGE stood and thrived as a social experiment, thousands of years back. So there is no questions of morality involved here. Morality is something we invented ourselves to get a good sleep. 

It might look like we are getting modernized or westernized, but in real, we are just getting rid of the layers and layers of bandage cloth worn over us, in the name of culture, tradition to discover our ancient selves buried in our genes. We are in fact getting back on our foot, on the track to the origin, under the ever guiding light of LOVE. 

LIVE-IN may undergo further adaptation in the years to come and we might end up as truly polyamorous as our cave men ancestors. 

“Whatever you suppress, persists! “

I think we are persisting; We are getting back to our roots; We are searching for the crossroad, where we were lost and lead to the wrong path; We are coming back, now, to the full circle.

P.S. The above written are strictly my imaginary views inspired a bit from Yuval Noah Harari's  "sapiens ". Leave your honest criticisms in the comment box :)