Why not to fall in love: A satire

My son is twelve. He is naïve, very, chubby-cheeks. I feel sorry for his innocence, at times. I actually feel sorry for him and my father as well. Of late, chubby-cheeks gets embarrassed looking at on-screen kissing scenes. Even in animations or may be a ‘harmless’ embrace between a boy and girl his age or slightly older. He now becomes stiff when I hug him in public, in front of his friends, or mine. In a year or two, he will start understanding his body differently. He will be sad, confused, irritated, angry and afraid. 

Numbers numb me always. They have an inherent toxic quality that acts on the senses. I guess all of us are affected by it but only some admit in real life. As per the UN World Population Records, life expectancy of Indians around 1937 had been in the mid-30s; in 1975, it was around 51, and, in 2008, the number rose to around 66. I look at my father and try to understand how much love he has experienced in this life of his, in the extra five decades that he has lived. Even worse, in the next six years of my life, what is in store for me? How to best use the remainder of what remains — of life, in love. I don’t know. I get scared and agitated. I am worried thinking about the 15 extra years that my son will live beyond the age I am supposed to extinguish myself.

If I had known sexual love in my early teens and my son is expected to have 15 extra years on him, why should his great ‘enlightenment’ not happen after 15 years? May be when he is 28 or 29 instead of the year next or the one following it? There seems a gross lack of planning on our end when we have elongated the string of life without knowing what tensile strength we need to endure. Simply because, he will have 15 extra years with almost nothing more to think! Isn’t that a shame?

So, why not keep up the fantasy for a few more years? Play on the ‘secret hush-hush’ game as long as we can. Because, once the beans are spilled, there is no way of going back to the days of unknowing. Because, suddenly my son will discover that there is nothing in it that he waited for, unconsciously. Not even the popcorn while watching Avengers: Endgame. At least the film has a title to understand what you may expect. Life doesn’t. I have a strong feeling that since we have conditioned ourselves to have a longer time to live on the planet with our disillusionments (for a longer period as well) we will have time to hatch our evil plans even further. At least this will help us to shy away from the boring concepts of monotonous sex and never-fulfilling love. I am sure of that. Why else should we deserve an Endgame otherwise? The only positive of such a disaster is, however, in the belief that there is nothing gratifying on this planet. Life is elsewhere, indeed. 

Definitely in the screens of 3D halls and mobile devices. Fantasy is fantastic when we engage our hands only for synthetic pleasure and visual engagement. It gives us the excitement of not doing it in real, for real. Porn will rule the world in future, not in secret windows of today but in the broader canvases of tomorrow. Parents will take children to porn zoo, porn circus, porn festivals — I am sure. To initiate them into the fantasy of nothingness. So that at 28 or 29, when they will be awakened to the idea of love, they will sufficiently reject it whole, completely.

Not being in love will save the children from marriage. Unfortunately to many singles dying to be married, the whole act of it is like travelling to heaven. The only problem is that you are always in a journey, the destination is not to be reached. Ever.

Every married couple fake that they are doing great. That they have a good time in bed as well. Honesty is the casualty, phew. It is nothing but a complicit agreement to not let the world know how dumb you are. A conspiracy that has always butchered our children. Had we been smart, our children would have been saved from falling in love and imagining a life he or she would never achieve. Precisely because of that ‘love’ must be guarded fiercely from them. Let them gorge on visual pleasures and find out later how worthless they actually are. The whole paranoia about lost love and love lost will gather dust then.

To help our children we need to help them in staying alone. To look at the mirror and love the face they see there more than anyone. Preach them that every other face is a choice. The biggest prize for being alone is living on your own terms. You don’t have to share bad breath, nose pickings, smelly farts or even your philosophies and bed with anyone else. 

The biggest challenge that I faced when I was forced to grow up was that, love, like sex, was never taught in the curriculums, neither at school nor at home. To find them out, we had to cross-question newly-married couples in the neighbourhood or, worse, in the films that were always black-and-white. And, it was so vague that even the early-teen understands that dishonesty is the champion. To be ‘perfect’ is to fall in ‘love’ — how fake is that? You end up more disillusioned since you don’t look like a star or behave like an ape round a girl. 

Why pretend all the time what you are not? Why fake beauty when you are, yes, quite ugly in your thoughts? The question will remain, eternally — what is love, anyway? Why do you need it? When hate is more honest why should we fool us and others of falling in love when we can rise in hate? Let us rather, pretend a fall, but not actually falling.