Hype?

This season of love, a friend of mine casually commented that there is too much hype about love. That there are so many other things in life that people should be doing instead of being stuck with girlfriends, boyfriends, affairs….. that the movies have a wrong influence on the lives of people. This was a friend who has been committed to a woman for the last 12 years!

I for one, spent all my life talking about love, thinking about love, writing about love in prose, poetry and painting! The only thing that did not happen was the experience of it. Ironically. And I believe that one’s whole world should revolve around love,….if there is no love, there is no life …..one should be lucky to experience it….. Treasure it and make sacrifices to keep it.

That being my mentality, when people say there is much hype about love… I cannot help being surprised at them!

And then, as if hit by a realisation, I begin to think that there are so many other such “objects” of aspiration in life, eagerly sought by half the population and unenthusiastically dismissed by the other half. I wonder what causes such polarization among people!

Perhaps, people are not so diverse inherently but their circumstances and experiences make them so diverse.

Take the software profession - the “pie in the sky” for thousands of engineering students in hundreds of universities across the country.
After spending four years in IT, after enough exposure to a mediocre crowd and working in ‘n’ number of copy paste projects, I know there is so much hype about IT (but for the lucrative income)…..

The only doll I had when I was 3 years old…was “Aunty Monica”…It was such a prized possession! The child of today, given the luxury of a basketful of more sophisticated toys tosses them all around and plays so very little….

When Doordarshan was the only channel on television, the whole family used to wait for the nine o clock Guniram, then the Mahabharat, Mogli in Jungle Book, watching every program with so much relish. Today most of us don’t watch even one of the 150 odd channels, but simply surf the TV jumping impatiently from one channel to another.

Be it Love, be it Software; be it toys or television, as far as the question goes about “How important is “something” in life? Is the hype too much or too little?”, there can be much debate but the answer is contained in a simple philosophy.

If you already have it in your life, then “there is too much hype about it”.
If you don’t have it, then “people don’t know the value of it”.
And that’s the law of the universe.

Those who have love, think there is too much hype about it and chase wealth. Those who have wealth say “Money is not everything in life” and chase love. Those in cities tour the countryside and those in villages fancy the tall buildings, cars and bikes.

The line from a Kannada folklore says it all“Iruvudellava bittu illaduda kadege hoguvude jeevana”.

That’s life. A journey of perpetual neglect towards what you have and unending pursuit of what you don’t have…….