Love Actually.

Love. Complex, mystical, blissful. Cliched adjectives that seek to describe this very un-cliched phenomenon. And then we safely assume "Love is beyond words"; again a cliche.

The real irony is that this easy to understand commonality and the cliches associated with it are what make it a fast sell.

Add to that the aggressive marketing being done on its behalf by the likes of Yash Raj and Sons. Nevermind the fact that they themselves find their allegiance in question in these times of fast love, fast marry and fast quits. Its almost a become a product worthy of being kept besides the FMCG stuff in supermarkets. "Jaldi Kha lo, nahi to expire/thanda ho jaega." (Eat quickly for it may expire soon/get cold.)

Such a strong marketing team coupled with our own libidos almost make it a compulsive must have.

I was, very recently, faced with answering the question, how does it feel to be in love.

Strangely and almost annoyingly, words like bliss, pure, serene and friendship kept popping up in my mind with a obstinate consistency. And then junta (people) started discussing (read speaking at once) and all I could hear was an infinitely long beep in my mind. After a while I came up with the conclusion that love may or may not be a lot of things, but the one thing that it consistently is, is it is "not boring". Also it is a "work in progress". The moment it stops being these things, the castle of hearts comes crumbling down.

(It was amazingly annoying how this question stuck with me. Just 2 adjectives. And those too bordering suspiciously close to the banal. Have the marketing geniuses got into my head too?)

So, anyway, what is love? People who are about to say "a chemical reaction in the brain" and feel really smart and cool are, well, hags. And they should run along now.

Few words, except the ones mentioned earlier, come to mind. Lust, Change, Pepsi, Farce, Freedom.

Love without lust would just be friendship now, wouldn't it? But that would make love one of the deadly sins. Bah. Another paradox for the philosophers to figure out.

Also, love has become a social farce too. Being in love is considered western here (in India) and the west deems it to be masochistic/chauvinistic. Too many restrictions and very less creativity are slowly becoming the norms for love. Hard to imagine a world where social norms dictate how and when we fall in love and how we behave when in love. Maybe we need a place called center along with the east, west, middle east etc. Bah. Again.

Itna kya sochta hain. Pyar kar na. (Why think so much. Simply fall in love.) Hence, Pepsi. (Don't get the relation? Maybe even I don't. It does make me sound pseudo complex though.)

Change and Freedom. Contradictory and Complimentary. Change or else and Freedom of change. Freedom to be who you are, express and discover your true self. Someone to trust with the freedom you generally don't give yourself while communicating with even the closest of peers. And the change that is almost a requisite if you want the freedom to endure. Again.

Bottom line? An overly simplified paradox that most of us don't really care to grasp. Pepsi peene se pehle contents poochta hain kya? (Do you ask about the contents before you gulp down a can of Pepsi?)

PS: This is written from a guy perspective. Since I am not a girl or a "Metrosexual", I cant really know what the fairer sex thinks. Comments are, as always, welcome.

This article deals with lusty love. Not the kind (hopefully) a mother and a child (and so on) have.