A philosopher’s thesis on love
By Khushwant Singh

WE are slowly turning into a nation of morons. We pick up the most meaningless practices of western society and indulge in them with juvenile gusto. So April 1, which no one in the West pays attention to any more, has become an occasion to make fools of our friends and ourselves. St Valentine’s Day is a more recent import. Valentine Day cards and insertions in newspapers proclaiming love are becoming more and more profitable for card manufacturers and newspaper owners. I find the occasion silly beyond comprehension, but I do not regard it as my business to stop other people indulging in the revelry. I also regard Holi as a juvenile pastime devoid of any religious or ethical significance. But it is not for me to object to others enjoying dousing each other with coloured water and covering their faces with gulaal powder. I believe everyone has the right to enjoy himself or herself as they think best, and no one has any business to dictate to them. Sangh Parivar, please note.

I come to St Valentine’s Day. Declaring love is not the monopoly of the young and the unmarried. Emotional entanglements last a lifetime. The timid take recourse to writing anonymous letters, sending cards with printed messages or ads in the papers. The brash and the brave spell them out to the objects of their desire. It is like at Christmas when cowards want to trap their loved ones under a mistetoe before they kiss them. The intrepid do so regardless of the parasite bush above their heads.

Schopenhauer (1788-1853), born in Danziq was the only son of a wealthy father and a party-loving mother much younger than her husband. His father committed suicide and left a large fortune to his son. Schopenhauer could have lived a comfortable life without doing a stroke of work but he preferred to study and then teach philosophy. He was not taken seriously by other philosophers and his first book sold a mere 250 copies. His classes were poorly attended. The break came in 1851 when his collection of essays became a bestseller.

Schopenhauer had a few love affairs. When he was 33 he fell in love with a 19-year-old girl singer. Ten years later, he fell for a 17-year-old beauty. He did not marry because he believed "to marry means to do everything possible to become an object of disgust to each other". He was close to being a manic-despressive and disdained the institution of friendship. He wrote, "A man of genius can hardly be sociable, for what dialogues could indeed be so intelligent and entertaining as his own monologues?"

While he conceded love to be a powerful force to engender both exhilaration and despair, he condemned it as distraction from more serious pursuits. So far so good. But when he pronounces, "The romantic dominates life because what is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation", he is surely off the mark. He must have suffered from a baby obsession because he never had one of his own. He can be faulted on many other grounds by people who have experienced love. What attracts men towards certain women may be their looks, intelligence, vivacity or homeliness; they may be infatuated by some and want to take them to bed as soon as possible, but hardly ever does a man look upon a woman as a possible mother of his children. I wonder what young people who exchanged Valentine Day cards make of the German philosopher’s thesis on love.

Dogri song-bird

To my ear Dogri sounds like a Punjabi dialect. Dogri lovers probably hold that Punjabi sounds like a Dogri dialect. Once I heard Dr Karan Singh give instructions to his servant in what I presumed was Dogri. I could understand every word they spoke in what sounded to me a quaint way of speaking Punjabi. However, the learned doctor (and he is certainly very learned) maintains that as early as 1317 AD, Amir Khusro recognised Duggar Bhasha as one of the languages spoken in India. Any literature it had must have been in the oral tradition because it was not till the 1940s that poetry and fiction in the language came to be published. The Sahitya Akademi gave it official recognition by instituting an award for the most outstanding writer of the year. Among the winners was Padma Sachdev, wife of the senior of the Singh Bandhu duo of classical singers, Surinder Singh. Her first collection of poems translated into English has been published by the Sahitya Akademi: A Handful of Sun & other poems. Among the translators is Dr Karan Singh, Mrinal Pande, Iqbal Masud and her husband. The majority of the poems are translated by Colonel Shivanath.

Padma has a Brahmanical Sanskrit background. She was brought up on Dogri mythology and folk-songs. For some time she worked with AIR at Jammu where she met and married Surinder Singh whose abiding passion was classical Hindustani vocal music. Poetry and music are twin sisters and make powerful unions. Padma’s poems are essentially songs. Surinder was the first to translate Padma’s Dogri verse into English and it is the first entry in the anthology:

It is dawn
Or a Yogi emerging from a trance
Or may be
The day melts in the evening
Or—-or
A bridal palanquin passing by
Does a nightingale sing,
A child smile
Or perhaps a passerby is speaking
The Dogri language?

An excellent example of rustic imagery blending with modern sophistication is a poem entitled Water:

I love
Deep wells,
Tanks with still waters.
And lakes
Whose waters
Are like spotless mirrors
And reflect only truth.
Who hide their own faces
And show up the faces of others.
When I try to make that shadow
One with my own shadow
Someone throws a pebble into the well,
And my world becomes hostage
To the wages moving in circles.
And I straighten my back,
And start filling the vessel,
And slowly,
Climb the steps
On the ascent from the well
Go towards my home.

Code language

Two friends went to dine in a restaurant. It was packed and they could not find any seats. After waiting a while they decided to go to another joint. A waiter gave them a clearance chit to hand over to the accountant who sat near the door and made sure that no one left without payment of the bill. On the chit was written a number 1004180. The code figure when broken read "I owe nothing for I ate nothing."

(Contributed by Satya Nand Joshi, Nawanshahr)