Cake-cooook

Maine cake-coook nahi khana

I often ask myself, What is love? I flunk to answer. I also flunk to understand the chemistry of it. Or is it Physics? I think it is a lot of chemical reactions going on at random in your mind. Flux. All the time. It needs no outside catalysts, mind you. It happens in any given condition. Sunshine or moonshine or pitch-dark nights. It just happens to you. In the middle of a dream or a fairy-tale movie. In a cocoa smelling cafe' when someone watches you from the corner of the eye. Probably due to its large psychological relevance, love is one of the most common themes in cultures, the world over.

Is it the most profoundly integrated state in the universe? I think it is simultaneously the highest, deepest and most powerful state of consciousness. And Trust me, I am not aggrandizing. I don't do that. I recall Khalil Gibran, one of the best philophers of last century.

When love beckons to you follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
As the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth
So is he for your pruning.

The lebanese thinker perhaps put it right. I know, Love is like heaven but it can also hurt like hell. So if you are smitten with cupid's arrow, you tread a delicate turnspike, one that is at once beautiful, enchanting but threadbare. It is a different, mad, sudden, blessed, edgy feeling!

I thought and thought and thought! I concluded thus: it is about Care. It is about looking at the Sun-downs, about walking together and talking through eyes without uttering a word. It is being together, without seeing each other for aeons. It is magic without magical spells. It is a cake. Don't worry. That is some crazy stuff in my head and that is vintage me!

sameer bhat