i am watching tere naam right now, and i have been thinking about obsessions, crushes, and infatuations. about love - mutual, platonic, or unrequited.
hindi movies are not the place to learn about love, or any of this stuff. they are crazy. they can make stalking look cool, or abusive, chauvinistic, sexist comments sound flirtatious. see they can make you want stuff that you would never in your right minds want.
so lets keep all hindi movies aside and then think about this.
what is the difference?
is the difference in the feeling, the intensity of the emotion, or the sanity of your actions? and who defines sane in any case? Can the duration of time a feeling lasts, define it?
infatuation, i am thinking this would be the easiest one to tackle, so let's start here. infatuation or a crush. something triggers it. it could be it is the first time you are seeing this person - the myth of love at first sight, or you could have known them all your life, and yet they do something different on this day. it could be a smile, a particular way of saying something, a gesture. i insist that there is a trigger, because if you look back i am sure you can pin point that exact moment in time before which you were not infatuated and then when you were. unless you have a really bad memory and now have no freaking idea of what happened when. :D its ok. you were preoccupied. happens.
usually, by general agreement, infatuations are not supposed to last too long. but that is what bothers me. who defines too long? two weeks? two months? two years? when do you say that an infatuation has turned in to an obsession?
obsessions, by the aforementioned general agreement seem to carry a negative connotation. they are some how deemed to be harmful. to yourself and to others. right. i guess it is not healthy to obsess about someone for ten years and still not have the guts to tell them. i see that. and also because obsessive behaviour usually leads to other destructive actions.
but what if you are not harming them, not stalking them, not concocting weird love potions, or doing any such thing that infringes on their daily life. nothing. you are happy to not even exist in their observable universe, you merely make them the centre of yours. what is so wrong in that? sorry, i don't get it. how is that really so different from an infatuation? an infatuation is a mere passing interest, a child looking through a shop window going 'i want that', and then moving on to the next colorful object with the same 'i want that'. as opposed to ' i want that' and then i never could bring myself to want anything else, ever again.
why is that so bad? or is there some deeper, darker, difference? something other than longetevity?
and when does an obsession enter that haloed realm of true but unrequited love? because if i get it right, popular culture denotes the that to be some pure, heavenly, sacred thing. doesn't it? how do you differentiate between the feeling that drives each of these? who gets to label these things?
it doesnot even have to be a person, it could be a thing you covet, or something you wanted to do. what if there was an idea in your head that for some reason you did not follow up on, life changed and you were somehow still stuck on it. you have not been able to get it out, all this while. how do you know if you should listen to the voice of reason telling you to move on or to that mysical - follow your bliss mumbo jumbo? this is what you want, this is what drives you, go get it philosophy.
your inaction, your not going and getting it, is it because you are being rational or is it because you are just too chicken, a coward dawning the garb of reason?
other people do not really care what your motivations are, they are just bothered about your actions,and how those in turn affect their own lives. but you need to solve this for your self. you need to figure out, what drvies you? what your inherent motivations are? what is the stuff you are made of? who are you - the coward or the priest offering sacrifices at reason's altar?
oh you hate both those words now don't you? anyways, what troubles me is, how would you distinguish between the two? its a qualitative analysis problem. what test would give two different observable results?
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