What is L*** ?

"What is love? Baby! don't hurt me, No more." I remember watching this song as a little kid. I just loved Jim Carey with his 'broken-dangling-neck' step. It was my first encounter to the word love. And mind you! I just loved the 'love'. It was fun. With passing years, as my trousers started to shrink which i blamed mostly on bad detergent; though i realized with time it wasn't the detergent which was at fault, rather it was some sort of hormone which kept stretching me; i actually started experiencing various different definitions of 'love'. By the time i was twelve i had developed a strong bond with the closest friend of mine in class. He would cut cake at my birthdays and i would do the same at his. It was love for me. Sharing tiff-in with him. Fighting for him,with the cliched groups we form at our schools, and ending thrown out of the group myself. Ironically he would be inducted back in my place. Any ways all of it was worth it. But life is like a big advertisement hoarding, made up into pieces. The jigsaw wasn't complete yet. Actually the game of love had just begun for me. I fell in love with a wonderful girl from my school days, a blunder i remotely regretted as well. By the time i was seventeen i had all of my life planned. From the day i begun planning to the day i will sit besides her, on the stereotypical armchair, smiling at my grandchildren. Typical? Isn't it? Most of us end up visualizing our grey days before we even qualify ourselves as legally adults. Well like most blind, daydreaming shepherds, i got dumped too. What did i expect? Yet again, only love.

Well, that was kind of a brutal halt to my journey in search of meaning to the word 'love'. But who am I to call curtains to the play called life? Being a stubborn a river, as it is, life went on finding its own path, meandering through different world altogether. And with the flow i came across several wounded soldiers like me. Not specifically wounded the way i was, but surely in love. Some had lost their lovers, some their goal, some missed their sport and some the darling hay days at school.

These beautiful creatures along with me made a perfect band of friendship. The music we played all along on our orchestra was 'love'. Love for friendship. Fighting each other, cursing each other on misdeeds, holding and hugging each other when anyone fell down. And even laughing when every single one of us fell down at the same time. Be it yellow, blue or pink every day was equal to us. The color never mattered all that mattered was love between us.

But birds from different nests someday have to fly back to their own places and so did we. The emptiness left, the void, it once again pulled back the same question into my heart. What is love?

I never felt it judicious to ask my grandparents, as most grandchildren end up doing. With their violent pasts it would not have been a great idea. And of course asking my parents would have resulted in no good. I would have ended up incarcerated, under their watchdog. Nay! not a good idea. Why loose one's credibility in one's parents eyes, that too for a petty thing like love. Their are better things to do that we don't want our parents to be aware off ;)

So walking again on my lonely path in search of true meaning for love, i decided to give life every shot possible. And then i met this girl. The girl i hated the most.

By the way, i wasn't a solitary reaper all this long as told by William Wordsworth. I was more of a man with commotion, revolting thoughts. The one who takes the roads less taken in Robert Frosts'.

So this girl had every innate idea about everything in the world, but love. For her this word never existed. In her presence i was forbidden to use the word. It was sought of blasphemy in her personally engineered religion called life. I still am forbidden to use it.

With her i learned all about all those great Indian poets and their take on love. Their sweet, lustful, bitter, revolting, patronizing, all varied portrayal of love. And yet she despised the very word love. I would give her points for her uncanny style of picking up lines which had hints of love and yet not the word itself.

She has been caring, pleasing, helping me all through 'latest-edition' days of my life. She had become more of my muse. Although i type all of it. Yet she has been the ink behind every single word i engrave.

I don't love her. How could i? She would not let me. Only if i could replace it with some other word. Maybe, ecstasy? Nay! to ecstatic and taboo. Or maybe passion? Nay? I don't like the sound of it. Can i replace this word ' love' ? With the sound it has and the music it creates,with its vibrancy and freshness despite all its antique origins. Nobody can, i guess.

The journey to the ocean for a solitary river like me has just begun and yet i find myself, surprised and enlightened at every turn the life takes. The search for the true meaning for the word 'love' can never come to end. Not with my life or with any others. Yet the journey is what i and everyone of us should cherish. That is what she says. Its a mysterious path which unfolds into newer realms with every experience. Do u feel the rumbles of excitement too at every new phase of life. If u do? then you are in love too. Oops! I just said the word again. Sorry!!