MISINTERPRETATIONS OF THE WORD ‘LOVE’

Love- it is that wonderful feeling which is largely described as masses as that which cannot be defined… but then, it is love that makes everything else definable. It is love when someone understands you and it is the same love which comes to play when you can understand someone... it is pure and it does have ‘that’ in it to make everything in those who come to it to be made pure, innocent, lovely, wonderful… it liberates one from all the feelings to which he has enslaved himself, knowingly and unknowingly.

‘Love’ has become the buzzword today… though the word is still misinterpreted largely.
The word means ‘something’ to the youth today. For most of them, it is that feeling they have when they see someone of the opposite sex whom they can go along with comfortably. Friendship is often mistaken for love. And then there was this popular movie which said ‘pyar dosthi hein; dosthi pyar hein...’ Of course, there is an element of love in friendship since it is love that binds human together. But this love shouldn’t be mistaken for the license to go propose one’s friend, because one should get married not to the one they can live with, but to the one they cannot live without...

The biggest mistake among all the misinterpretations would be the one where people go to one and ask, “Are you in love?” This question is utterly pointless. What they mean is of course whether you are going out with anyone, but the way the question is framed is, well I can’t find another word for it, disgusting!! Love is that which lights a smile on a mother’s face when she sees her baby, the pride of a dad, the care of a brother, that understanding grin between you and your sister... It is that which makes you feel that your friend is now feeling bored in class and the laughs that the chit of paper you pass to him bring about... It is not a feeling that exists only between a boyfriend and a girlfriend.

Love is that feeling which makes you care more and more, when you say ‘I don’t care’. We care for those whom we love... and it is from love that all the other feelings arise- compassion, generosity, friendship and humour too, since a genuine smile is involved only where we are involved truly, and love exists at all such instances.

And talking about relationships, it is still a widely accepted notion that it is only in blood relationships that there is an element of love. What we see around us in the relationships would disprove that notion. We see parents brutally murdering their kids while at the same time there are friends dying for each other, a wife killing her husband while a girl commits suicide so that her eyes can be donated to her loved one, brothers not talking with each other because they feel that the other sibling is just ‘not their type’ when a virtual brother does everything in the world to see that his ‘sister’ is happy…

It is not that there is no love at all in a family; it is just that it can’t be called a family when there is no love... The members of the family may not have to be directly related, but they have to be caring and understanding. Even the complete strangers from entirely different backgrounds, living together in a room can live happily if there is love between them…

Another thing which is really difficult for me to accept is when someone says, “I understand the love you have”; really, is it possible to understand love?? When we decide to understand it, it leaves us bewildered, and then when we try to understand, things may seem to fall in place, but when we reach a point where we feel that we are close to the ‘understanding’ we were looking for, everything seems to be confusing and we find ourselves at the spot where we started from.. This is the power of love; no one can truly understand it, even if he experiences it…

I am not sure whether these really are some misinterpretations, because what might seem to be a misinterpretation may actually be the right one wrongly taken for granted over a long period of time.. But then the love I have towards these words and ideas compels me to put it down on paper, rather on the screen!!