Does Love still exist?

It was just one of those days when I was asked by the training department of our college to interact with the freshers and share some placement gyan with them. After talking for a while about placements, they got bored and asked to play some game. So here I was conducting an interaction game for them where a girl and a boy are randomly chosen and given the chance to ask each other questions.  There was this one question that caught my attention.

The boy asks, “What is your opinion about love?  Would you prefer love marriage or arranged marriage?” To which the girl replied, “Love is just for time pass. I don’t believe in love and will marry only the person whom my parents find for me.” It was this answer of the girl that made me think.

Does love really still exist in our world? Or has it given way to just lust and become a time pass game for youngsters?  There was a time when ‘love’ was a taboo. Then mention of the L-word was considered equal to a sin. Then there came a time when love started blooming and we had some great love stories that made the world proud. Now we are going into a period where love has simply become a time-pass like everything else.

Love never had a timeline. Love stories were eternal. Laila-Majnu, Heer-Ranjha, Romeo-Juliet these are names that will remain etched in the memories of people for generations to come. They would always be known as a pair and never as a single entity. But in today’s world where do we have such examples? We read of an emotional love story of Ravinder Singh and roll tears but do we see such things happening around us? Like everything else today love also has an expiry date, which is indeed sad. The timeline usually is the 3-4 years of college life. The paradigm has shifted from ‘love’ to ‘break-up’.

We have reached a stage where love looks all colourful and beautiful only on the big screen and in books. But the reality has taken a harsher turn. The Bible says to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Harry Potter’s greatest gift was love. Girls still wish for a lover like SRK from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. But in reality what happens is we just brush aside the love that someone pours on us.

This world works through love. So where exactly are we headed when love has just become something that money can buy now? Is lust the new love? It wouldn’t hurt to give these questions a long thought. By saying ‘I LOVE YOU’ to someone, you are offering a lot of unsaid things. You are offering trust, a shoulder to cry on, a promise to take care for a lifetime. And when it changes to ‘WE NEED TO BREAK-UP’, you are breaking in fact shattering a person’s life amongst these things. So just be a little careful before you jump into the ocean of love. You might just break a heart which sure doesn’t make any noise. Go out and live a life filled with true love.