Saturday, February 28, 2009

Love/Hate

I've heard somewhere that Naseeruddin Shah and Kevin Bacon never watch their own movies; similarly, Ian Botham never went to nets for practice or say, Neil Diamond never used to rehearse before any performance. However, I am incidentally not a genius of their stature; so I need to revisit every work of mine more than once so as to learn more about the things which I did and even those things which I didn't. That revisiting not only helps in improvisation but also provides me with a few topics, sometime. For example, while revisiting my last post, I stumbled across this love-hate thing and decided to think more about it and scribble something.

Well I consider love and hate to be very close to each other; particularly when they tend to become extreme. That may sounds pretty surprising to many people but I think it's just like head/tail or north/south or black/white relationship. If you've one of them, then other would also be there accompanying the first one. However, there is another facet of this relationship, stressed upon by the preachers of love; which is that 'If you find yourself hating someone you thought you loved, then I would have to question whether you really felt love at all.' It is very easy to mistake need for love. Real love just loves, freely, without expectation. If that love is rejected, you may feel sad, but if hate is your response to rejection it indicates a feeling of entitlement & expectations.

Many times hate is a covering emotion, it covers other hurt feelings that are just too painful to bear. It is interesting to note that our desire for exclusivity arises in romantic love but not in hate. On the contrary, in hate we want to see our negative attitude shared by others. It seems natural that we want to share our negative fortune with others while wanting to keep the positive part merely to ourselves. In positive emotions, when we are happy, we are more open to being attentive to other people, but we guard the source of our happiness more.

Many testimonies, as well as fictional works, describe situations in which people find themselves hating the person they love. This might initially appear to be contradiction, for how one can love and hate the same person at the same time. A discussion of this problem requires making a distinction between logical consistency and psychological compatibility. Hating the one you love may be a consistent experience, but it raises difficulties concerning its psychological compatibility.

Love and hate are often described to be diametrically opposed; in this case, it is impossible to speak about hating the one we love without engaging in a logical contradiction. Two major arguments can be raised against this description. First, love is broader in scope than is hate, as it refers to more features of the object. Thus, while in hate the object is considered to be basically a bad agent, in romantic love the object is perceived to be both good and attractive. Second, there are many varieties of each emotion (and there are more kinds of love than of hate), and each kind cannot be the exact opposite of all other kinds of the other emotion.

Besides, there is an even more interesting point of view in which people claim that one hates because one loved. To illustrate, they mean that basically you hate someone whom you really wish to love, but whom you cannot love. Perhaps because you love him so much that you are unable to deject yourself even when the love is not been reciprocated, or maybe he himself prevents you or for some other reason. That way, hate is thus a disguised form of love.

What I feel is that if you bother to hate someone, you care enough about them to give them a great deal of "room" in your head. If you love them you do the same. I think indifference should be considered the opposite of love, in fact even of hate. Indifference is the strongest force in the universe. It makes everything it touches meaningless; love and hate don't stand a chance against it.

3 comments:

Quaintzy Patchez said...

Ahem ahem.. whats going on? ;)

You were writing poems for someone today?

Nishant said...

lagta hai aajkal kuchh jyada hi time mil raha hai sochne ke liye.
Too much philosphy

Peyush said...

Nishant is right;
khali dimag blogging ka ghar