Great art, literature, cinema and legends would not be the same without love. Without it there would be no ‘Madhavi’, no ‘Jhahera’ and no ‘Khamba-Thoibi’. There would be no ‘Othello’ no ‘Romeo and Juliet’.

If there is no love there would be no ‘Taj Mahal’ standing for ages on the bank of the Yamuna river. Plays have been written, poetry have been penned and monuments have been built because there is an emotion in human heart which we call love.

What is love? If we have been asked to answer it, then it is like we have been asked to define an impossible which takes shape in many forms in our hearts.

Love comes out from a mysterious, complex and undefinable area in our mind and to give a proper definition to it is impossible. Men try to define love in many ways but it ends to be less impactful to go near it. Love loves to take the form of mystery, a complicated word to define.

Instead we are asked a question like this ‘What do you feel when you love someone?’ It is somewhat easy. We can answer it with a sentence like this, ‘I always hope for the best for him or her’. Then we can somehow conclude about the definition of love as ‘Love is an emotion, a feeling, a wanting and a being’.

First, we, human beings love himself before they love others. We have taken very much care about our body, our heart and truly put ourselves first in love. When we see the failings and misfortunes in others, then in our inward mind, we have got a feeling ‘thank God this doesn’t happen to me’.

It can be taken as a sigh of relief that such a misfortune be not befall to us. This is a kind of self-love and self-care. Sometimes blinded by this self love we feel happy to see the misfortunes of others.

If this feeling can be transformed into a feeling, an emotion of mind that the heart can embraced the failure and misfortunes of others as our own, then we have got a huge reservoir of love of mankind in our heart.

With this we can come out in search of love from others and enter into relationship with others. If we have got a potential in ourselves, by loving ourselves and by taking care of it in body and mind, then we can give love to others and share love with others.

Love cannot be kept long in a closet. It should be open, free to blossom. If you love someone, you should express it. There comes in our life certain moments when we are timid and shy about expressing the love we feel for someone.

For fear of embarrassment which might come from the other end, teenagers hesitate to say the actual word ‘I love you’. But when the chance of such moments to express his or her desire of love to someone has gone, it sometimes turns one into violent mood and frenzy and often leads to a fit of despair which might have got a deep impact in the mind which leads to depression.

Let me narrate one incident. Out of the 79 deaths that occurred in the month of October last as reported in this paper on the 1st November under the caption ‘Blood soaked October’, six belonged to the locality where this writer has made his nest.

Within a span of 48 hours these killings have been done. While an outfit claimed the responsibility of killing four of the six deaths, the reason of killing of the other two has not made yet.

After the death of these boys many emotional stories attached to the lost lives came to light. One boy who had met his fate, had earlier expressed his true love to one girl. He had made to win the love of the girl.

He had written beautiful love-letters, made requests to the girl to say at least a few words of love or hate for him. The girl though she loves him truly from the core of her heart never expressed her love and failed to say him ‘I love you too’.

But when the news of the death broke to her, she disrobed her coyness and timidity and without caring for the world she wailed and cried chanting loudly ‘I love you, I love you’. But the heart that had longed for this word had gone. And the girl is still in shock. So, lovers, have to ease their mind by expressing their love for others. There is no harm in it.

Actually, love needs no word. Each and every word or action carefully chosen and not offend others is actually words that express love. Really these are just other ways of saying ‘I love you’.

When a mother tells her son when the son is about to go for a drive ‘Take care, don’t drive too fast’ or ‘Return home early’, the mother’s words actually mean safety on the road for her son and to return home before dusk.

But in real, these words means that ‘I love you my son. You are important to me, I care what happens to you, I don’t want to get you hurt’. This means that the mother didn’t say what she wanted to say actually and she kept it in her heart.

If the son sees the meaning beneath the words of his mother, he will definitely see the love and care of the mother. But today’s boys and girls fail to see the meaning within and many a time the meaning never gets communicated at all and our young boys and girls think they are left unloved and unwanted.

Actually sometimes parents have made clumsy expressions to their children, sometimes took the mask of cruelty in their visages. A father may nag his son about his lower grades in the examination, about his habit of going late to bed and late to rise, about his manner of dress.

The son may hear only the nagging but if listen carefully, he will hear the love underneath the nagging. His father wants him to do well, to be successful. His concern and love for his son unfortunately emerge in his nagging. But it is love all the same.

Through ages man have always been in love with man. This is what we call ‘universal love’, love of mankind. Sages have seen this love in the faces of men. They listened love in every object of Nature. Budha, Jesus, Krishna, Gandhi, Lincoln, all had understood the language of love hidden in every language of mankind.

But the problem of this present day world is that we don’t try to listen each other. We rarely try to know what others are saying. In an age, where there is tumult, noises all around, man fails to listen to the words and see the actions that accompany love.

We only listen for war, hate, rejection and mis-understandings. This is the reason why the bullets are flying freely in our society and we have seen red everywhere.