Write an essay on Love.
It is never easy to define love. Yet I shall attempt. Love is real as well as abstract. Real because it is the chief driving impulse in human life; it is the basic truth of human civilisation. Abstract because it can be felt, but not seen or touched. For thousands of years man enjoyed its blessings. Mutual needs, mutual helps and cooperation fostered through love.
The above may be posed as a workable definition of love. The phenomena of love is directly related to the human heart. Animals, too, are bound together and move together. They, too, betray mutual respect or mutual help in their behavior. But that is their instinct.
Only when the feelings of the heart are ignored or when they are not felt to be absolute in human relationships, there is disaster. Wordsworth once lamented (= grieved) that men have lost ‘love’. Their principal concern in life is mere ‘getting and spending’. Thus we ‘lay waste our boon’ (= gift). It renders a real and pathetic picture of our decay no doubt.
We have, however, to remember that real love is not an unmixed blessing. It entails (= gives rise to) sacrifice and suffering also. In nature also there are flowers and thistles; no rose without thorns, it is said. The metaphor applies to human life more severely.
Love fulfils our desires and raises expectations. But life and the world is too enacting (=demanding) in its ways. Its complications often interpose (= come between) between genuine lovers and create misunderstandings. Such situations call for patience and endurance (= tolerance) in lovers. Most major tragedies are due to want of this virtue in lovers.
Another great about love is that truth and great love is always a one-way affair, without feelings of return like the love of Radha for Krishna. Such a love becomes sweet though sorrowful, sad but of a spiritual essence.
Love and hate are opposed phenomena (= ideas in life), but they are not of equal value. Love is self-generative (= prosperous of self) while hate is self-destructive. Love is able to conquer hate, but not vice-versa. The lives of the great sages or saints, the great literatures all point to this universal truth.
If we judge from another angle we shall arrive at the same conclusion. Love is endless. It originate, only within ourselves and expands without limit. It is limitless like the air that has only sky as its domain of existence and not any other object. But hate begins with our self and ends with our self also. All human vices like pride, vanity, power, avarice (= greed for money) are the offsprings of hate in the ultimate analysis. Their material prosperity is not prosperity in the true sense. Rather they are like towers built on quicksands. They stand only so long as the foundation is held by artificial measures, but crumble like a tower of cards no sooner than the Selfish Giant dies. A Hitler, a Mussoulini, a Mahmud Ghazni lives only in the pages of history like idle curios (= objects of idle interest). But a Buddha, a Ramakrishna Paramhansa, a Dayananda Saraswati, a Tagore or a Vivekananda lives like burning lamp in the heart of succeeding generations. Love triumphs over everything.
