The Very Short History of Love in India

Yes, the quest to know what love is has always been there. When asked once, a friend simply replied, "that which is there between you and I", bowling me over. But that was a time when arguments were required for everything, such answers and experiences did not matter--I mean I was young and stupid!

To be cynical of love was to be 'a decent person' in those times--that was somehow the moral spectrum of a young teen. Only now, as reasoning dominates my quest for arguments, do I realize, that we (my friends and I) were being critical of the love de Bollywood-style. Surely, we did love our parents then, as we do now. So what love were so puzzled about...

The Bollywood-style love may have been the harbinger of modernity in India and may have benevolently bestowed upon us, some individualism along with importing some boredom from the western life-world. But its day is done. Today, we are able to look at both Bollywood films and its version of love far more critically. We are able laugh at it as a culture and talk about it all as well in reviews in popular mediums! And we are able to make movies that say so, too. And I love that!

How did our parents, grandparents and great-grand parents live and love, I wonder. In relative freedom from having to battle Bollywood-style-love, surely? Perhaps with more respect and acknowledgment for the flickers and affectations of early adulthood or adolescence, yet waiting to see what lasts... perhaps dutifully responding to the not-Bollywood style-love by being in constant preparation to receive the one and only. Hmm, I am possibly romanticizing my parental generation a lot! 

My god, the history of this thing called 'love' sometimes appears so very short in India! 

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