I am all for pretend, transient love. It is the kind that is expressed in the moment, that does not endure and is not necessarily genuine. Every time I think of it, two songs come to my mind instantly. One of them is a ghazal.
Better fake, transient love than genuine, enduring hatred.
The first song that comes to mind is ‘Palbhar ke liye koi hamey pyar kar le, jhootha hi sahi’ from the 1970 film ‘Johnny Mera Naam’. The song was written by Rajendra Krishna, composed by Kalyanji Anandji and sung by Kishore Kumar. The other one is a ghazal by Mehdi Hassan written by Farhat Shehzad. It is ‘Tanha tanha mat socha kar’. In that there is an antara that goes “Pyar ghadibhar ka hi bahot hai, Jhootha sachcha mat socha kar.”
Both constructs are similar in their poetic underpinnings in that they both advocate pretend, even fake, love that is transient. Perhaps the idea is that the one receiving that love should feel that it is real.
Love by its very nature is a massive chemical turbulence in one’s brain that does not last more than ten minutes. Or so I believe. What lasts is the illusion of it. Fake love is fine because more often than not the recipient cannot tell the difference, especially if it is a man.
I have next to no understanding of love. It is possible that I have experienced it, but I am not entirely certain. It has always been hard for me to process received human emotions. I remember when I was 21, a young woman in the similar age group once asked me, “Are you flirting with me?” To which I countered, “What’s that?” She thought I was being facetious and laughed. For me it was a genuine question because I do not know how to flirt.
Perhaps I am giving too much information here but I have never felt the need to be romantically loved. That is mainly because I just don’t get it. I can never tell someone “I love you” without sounding transparently insincere. I just can’t carry off love or, any rate, expressions of it.
This post was triggered by the fact that I woke up singing the Johnny Mera Naam song. I had written about this theme in my blog some time ago. It had no particular point to it other than making a couple of observations about what you humans call love.