Does love inspire the worst in you?

If you have read mythological stories, or their Amar Chitra katha versions at the least, you are bound to come up with the most awesome and awful stories of what love might demand of a person, and to what lengths and depths a person might go for that. Think burning a thousand ships to not let your love get away, travelling to the netherworld to chop off a demon’s head to get their earrings as a token of love, agreeing to let seven infants be murdered – our mythologies are replete with stories of horrible things that people agreed to in the name of love, never mind that they are all later somehow sanitized as having been necessitated by Fate or whatever. 

​It is one thing when it is an adventure-rich story, but quite another when one does dreadful things in the name of love in real life. If you just grab a newspaper on any random day, you would see stories of people killing spouses so they can marry each other, persons going through cosmetic surgeries to be like each other, robbing, looting, murdering, assaulting – every horrible thing one can imagine, really.

Fact is, people have been doing amazing, wondrous things in the name of love, like build the Taj Mahal, but they do horrible things as well in the name of love like kill other suitors, imprison their brothers and other things. Gods and emperors might get to whitewash the deeds they do in the name of love by divine will or a grand edict, but for the regular junta, there is no such luck – one typically gets caught sooner or later.

In our everyday life, perhaps we don’t get to the extremes, but ask yourself this: Does love inspire the best in you? Or does it bring out the worst in you?

Possibilities are that you would have done, or at the least imagined doing some pretty horrible things. If you are being quite honest with yourself, I would imagine that you can remember one or more times that you have done massively wrong things or a number of times that you have done smaller things such as eavesdropped, spied, manipulated, lied, deceived, stole, broken passwords, stalked or any number of such ‘bad’ things that you would never think of doing in any other circumstances and would actually be quite against. Generally, one would think of such actions as a failure of character.

Perhaps, that’s why they say people fall in love.

Are we destined to have such falls? Can’t one, to use the cliché, rise in love and do only the awesome things?

Think of love as energy, as a power. Just like fire, whether it cooks a meal or burns down a house is dependent on what place it has in one’s life. If one lets it fully take over one’s life and love becomes obsessive, the more dangerous and hurtful it is. When love is held in its place, it can light up your world. 

As written for and published by the New Indian Express

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