Scorching Sacred Love

Transcript

00:00 Outlook brings to you excerpts from its latest issue titled "Love Virtually".

00:05 Ahead of Valentine's Day, Outlook's latest issue explores the many kinds of love,

00:10 from online dating for the youth and dating for the elderly,

00:14 to the otherworldly and unrequited love.

00:17 The issue also looks at how the concept of love has evolved

00:22 at a time when the divide between communities of different faiths is widened by politics.

00:28 "Scorching Sacred Love" by Arundhati Subramaniam.

00:32 Arundhati is a poet and writer.

00:35 Bhakti is not bedtime prayer in some safe enclave of the heart.

00:39 Love of the divine isn't ornamental, it certainly isn't tame,

00:44 and it most definitely isn't for the faint of heart.

00:47 If teddy bears and chocolate were the landscape of love,

00:51 life would, of course, be gloriously simple.

00:54 Also, a trifle vapid, but that's another matter.

00:58 The fact is that love is, and has always been, a sticky business.

01:03 And not just vanilla sticky, sticky in a bloody, snotty way.

01:07 A living and dying kind of way.

01:09 The problem is, no one tells us so.

01:12 If the darker side of fairy tales help prepare children for existential issues,

01:17 ranging from terrors of abandonment to sibling rivalries,

01:21 where are the adult almanacs for human love?

01:24 Is greeting card verse meant to do the trick?

01:27 Is a movie like Animal meant to prepare us for the lurching cardiogram of romantic love?

01:33 How do we understand what turns moonlight and roses into toxicity, betrayal and rejection?

01:41 And what eventually enables love to ripen into wisdom?

01:45 Stories offer insight, but poems, I believe, go deeper.

01:49 Poems offer insight more directly, swiftly and profoundly than stories ever can.

01:56 Many years ago, when I began reading Indian sacred poetry,

02:00 I found to my amazement that there was a wealth of insight here

02:05 about how to navigate the darker tides of love.

02:09 What was this such a well-kept secret?

02:11 Why had I grown up believing that our bhakti literature

02:15 was all about pious saints looking rapturously heavenward?

02:19 Why did I never hear the ferocity, the desperation, the erotic tensions,

02:24 the yowl and the ecstatic cry in their voices?

02:27 Why had I believed that devotion was all about meek service

02:32 at the lotus feet of despotic gurus and capricious deities?

02:36 Why had I never been encouraged to hear the risk, the terror, the longing,

02:41 the sheer sensual appetite for union and dissolution?

02:46 For this and more, read the latest issue of Outlook.