Is this love?

A few days back one of my friend had put a rhetorical question "Is THIS love?" on her Facebook status message only for me to reply with a wise-ass crack (no pun intended), "THIS is not love. THIS is a demonstrative pronoun." I know that it will be impossible for anyone to come up with a definition as to what constitutes a feeling called love. So this post is just my way of expressing what I feel is real love, or, how an ideal love should be.

When we are in love, it feels as if everything in this world suddenly seem to make more sense. Birds are chirping, rain is falling, and the world stops spinning. We get many forward mails that seem to define what true love is. Love is life, love is sharing, love is understanding, love is this, love is that and what not. And then there are the types of love. Love at first sight, love from friendship, and even love from hate. But all that matters is that when we are in love, everything else just doesn't seem to matter at all. The body, the brain, and six senses just want to be in company of our better half. We have heard so many dialogues that people throw when they are in love: "You are on my mind all the time. I'll give my life for you. You are carved in my heart. You are a part of me. I am in you. I am you. You complete me. etc." Many do mean what they say, and some just to take advantage. I always wondered, how true is the statement that our partner's  feelings are imbibed in our senses when we are in love.

What if we are stripped of all senses, feelings and emotions?  Would we be still capable of "feeling" love? We have seen people in vegetative state where they are incapable of expressing their emotions. But does that mean that they don't feel love? Is love truly magical that it could exist in absolutely nothing? To evaluate this assumption, we need to understand whether there is a possibility of being in a state where we are devoid of senses and feelings. Medical theory says, hell yeah! According to evolution, underneath all these facade of  sophistication, culture and logic, we basically are animals. So when we are under stress, the brain stimulates adrenalin and switches off all supplementary bodily functions such as sexual arousal,  pleasure...etc. There is only one primitive function that will exist, fight-or-flight. This is our body's mechanism in response to stress. Imagine staring at a hungry tiger, what would go in your mind? McDonalds? Titanic? Come on! You would want to get the hell out of there. Could you feel love in this state? What if you are stripped of even this level of  sense? Imagine standing on a railway track with a train approaching you at a breakneck speed. You are unable to move. Brain overload! Can you feel love then? Is it even possible for any kind of feeling to exist in that state? I say, Yes it is possible, and I have seen it with my own eyes.

One of my friend had just come to back to India on his study break, and so my other friends and I decided to have a get-together in his hometown, Pondicherry. We all started on our bikes, and had a very pleasant journey from Chennai to Pondicherry along the scenic East Coast Road. We reached Pondi around 7:00 PM, and decided to rent a room at the hotel to just sit, talk and catchup on all the lost details. The roads of Pondi, in accordance with the French and Indian tradition of road building, are pretty narrow, and the stretch where we were gathered was poorly illuminated. Having said that, the ECR is one of the busiest routes of South India, where public and private transports of all forms and sizes ply throughout day and night. We were standing outside the hotel waiting for the rest of the gang to arrive when we heard a screech of the brakes, a few loud thuds, some metal noise, and a scream of a woman. It seems that a biker, who was in his 40s and who was carrying his wife and his kid on his bike, tried to overtake government bus, but only to pull up just at the last moment. However, he was too late to swerve away from the way of the bus, and the bus hit the bike from the back, making the driver to lose balance. All three who were on the bike fell on that busy road with the bike sliding along the road due to the momentum.

Medical theory predicts that it is exactly at this moment that all our body senses are shut, including the fight-or-flight mechanism, and we are left in the hands of fate to decide our life. It is at this moment, the woman and wife expressed what I consider the benchmark of love. She screamed. Whats' the big deal in screaming when you are about to die? I believe that no matter what accent we cultivate, or what languages we learn, when we feel pain, we just seem to shout "aaaa", an incoherent and meaningless grunt to express our pain. This woman didn't scream "aaa." She screamed "ennanga." ( என்னங்க - a tamil word, a very respectful and loving way of calling one's husband). The moment when every sense in her body would have shut, she impulsively managed to call out, perhaps for one last time, to her husband, to make sure that he is alright. She is just a normal Indian woman, in her mid thirties, with a 12 year old kid. She is the type of woman where we take for granted that she might not approve of love marriage, or might not have experienced love, or a conservative woman., or someone just too insignificant to include when we young generations discuss about love. She didn't scream for her. She didn't scream for her own flesh and blood, her son. She didn't scream for her mother, the second most usual response to pain. And she didn't call for the God. She screamed for her husband. The love for her husband still evident, still active, even when every sense and hope in her body and mind has gone into shutdown mode. Love, is indeed capable of existing in absolutely nothing and everything. I dedicate this post to that woman, to all those who are truly in love, and to those who wear their heart on their sleeves so that they could keep their better half in their hearts.

P.S: The woman, man, and their kid survived with just a few bruises. Fairy tale ending does exist.
This post is just my opinion. I definitely don't imply that only women are capable of expressing love. It just happens that in this incident, it was a woman.