(Cupid is the Roman
god of love, affection and desire. It is believed that anyone shot by Cupid’s
arrow was stuck with deep love and longing)
Dear Cupid,
I don’t believe we have ever met. I always held a grudge
towards you because I believed you shot me with all the wrong arrows over time
and messed up my life. In recent times, however, that belief has been changing.
I slowly started realizing that you seem to have gone on some sabbatical for
the longest time. Either that, or you have outsourced your job to some BPO in
heaven (or wherever you are based) filled with quacks
and have instead started focusing on materialistic things like giving IT whiz
kids “get rich quick” app ideas like tinder or transferring your romantic skill
sets to wedding planners, thus ushering in an era of over the top weddings.
I say this because I see the abysmal state of relationships
all around me today. It is ironic that we are a generation that made DDLJ run
in Maratha Mandir for over ten years, got Titanic a permanent place in romantic
movie history and gave Leonard-Penny and Ross-Rachel a cult like following, as
we are the biggest disbelievers and cynics of love today. Getting a date for an
evening on tinder is as easy as ordering a pizza on foodpanda. We are a
generation that prides itself on convenience and comfort, but we seem to have
forgotten that the best things in life come only when we throw ourselves out of
our comfort zone and strive hard towards them. I am the last person to oppose
divorce on strong grounds..after all, there is nothing more lonely than an
unhappy marriage. But these days, people seem to opt out of marriage for the
silliest of reasons. In fact, leaving a marriage has become as common a
decision as leaving a job.
I am not exactly sure when things went wrong. I still
remember rose day in college as the day many guys mustered the courage to tell
girls their feelings. I still recall Shahrukh Khan being the epitome of
romance, whom men scoffed at openly but idolized privately. When did tinder and
trulymadly take over from the time a guy agonized over months whether to ask
that cute girl out and worked super hard at impressing her when he finally did?
When did arranged marriage become a market of broken hearts or a deal as
practical as a corporate merger as compared to something that was taken
seriously as a lifelong commitment that families got together and mulled over?
We are a generation that values ambition over affection,
practicality over romance and convenience over commitment. It’s unfortunate
that online marriage portals and professional matchmakers actually filter
clientele based on income and family wealth, because I thought it was a
well-established fact that money can’t buy love, fidelity or compatibility. It’s
also unfortunate that the plethora of dating apps have made it so easy to find
people by just swiping left (or right..not sure which. I have always had a
pathetic sense of direction.) Because again, nothing that comes easily is
appreciated or valued.
Relationships require a hell lot of effort and work. But
since the time you have vanished, we chose to invest that effort in our
entrepreneurial ventures, our passions and our travel plans. There is nothing wrong with that, it’s just
that after all of that, we still lead achingly empty lives.
So the bottom line is, please stop spending time in Arijit
Singh’s studio or Yash raj’s office when “love shots" are being conceptualized.
Please return to the real world, my friend. Please fill us with the longing and
love (mind you, not lust) towards people and not things so that we work as hard
towards our relationships as we do towards our careers. The world has gazillion problems as it is, let’s
at least keep love and compassion intact so that we can work together and focus
on the more pressing ones.
Best regards,
Casper.
