I Love Being Alive

Human life is really a magic box, and love is the most intricate maze within that box.

Watching 'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai' over and over, I used to think Anjali was simply foolish to choose Rahul over Aman.

Then many years passed. One day, like a spring storm, something swept into my life, and suddenly I found myself loving someone with terrible intensity! After falling in love with this person, I discovered that my foolish heart wants no one else in this world. Who might be better or far better than them—I have no headache about that; I need only them to live.

It feels as though billions of years ago, and billions of years hence, I want only them. I might survive without them, perhaps, but living while forgetting them is impossible for me.

Slowly I understood why Anjali had chosen Rahul over Aman that day. Life belongs to whoever lives it.

Love, in truth, is a formula-less equation, an equation with no fixed rules. No matter what formulas you apply, no matter how much you heed laws and regulations and notions of right and wrong, love will continue winding along at its own pace. You cannot bind it and make it run in any straight path.

Why does the incomparably beautiful Rekha still wear vermillion in her hair, in someone's name or namelessly; why couldn't Prince Charles love the exquisitely beautiful Princess Diana, and why couldn't Diana love anyone but Charles; why did Helal Hafiz, a man of pure poetry, choose no one and spend so many days of his life alone—there are no explanations for these things. Not everything needs explaining. There is a certain beauty in accepting what is as it is.

In life, they all had thousands of reasons to choose many others, they had many opportunities to spend their brief lives as life demanded. Then why did they still...?!

Actually, not getting the person we love or long for in life is perhaps the deepest form of getting. Once we get them, the person of our heart tends to disappear. This is why after loving someone intensely, we never love anyone else—we merely perform love. Falling in love is easy; loving is not.

People fall in love out of the need to live, and love in preparation for dying. No! I don't want to think anymore! An equation that cannot be solved by formula cannot be solved by logic either.

It seems some people live to love, while others love to live. And me? I simply live to live. Love is too complicated a thing; it's easier to live submerged in romance and desire instead! When living becomes difficult, I take refuge in romance, I indulge desire. That's it—all quarrels with life are settled! Life flows on quite nicely without life's special person; there's no inconvenience at all!