00:00I know this is the time for love stories, but my will is about love.
00:05Every year, February 14 is fetishized as the day of love.
00:08Red hearts and teddies and chocolates and roses are everywhere, in the real and in the
00:14virtual world.
00:16Love sells.
00:17Two people now find what's best available based on their exchange value.
00:22Love, how does one hold it?
00:29Define it.
00:30It is a whisper in the dark, a fist raised in defiance, a longing stretched across borders.
00:39It is both the silence between lovers and the roar of revolutions.
00:43Love has always been political.
00:46In a country where caste, class and religion dictate who you may love, love itself becomes
00:51an act of resistance.
00:53Love is colorblind, they say, yet seen through a prism, it has many hues.
00:58Political, religious, revolutionary.
01:01James Baldwin wrote, love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.
01:08To love is to rethink our sense of reality and it honors the dignity and freedom of the
01:13other.
01:14That's a political act because it means coming to terms with history and questioning it.
01:18Love can reclaim the lost promise of democracy.
01:21It alone can condemn the exploitative logic of capitalism.
01:25It can imagine new modes of relationality.
01:28It can redeem societies, people and histories.
01:33The answer and the antidote is the politics of love.
01:37But is that politics easy in the digital world where technology has made us hyper-connected
01:42while also isolating us from each other, making us lonelier?
01:48All the lonely people, where do they all belong?
01:52Some say love is divine, not the tame, ornamental kind, but the love that burns, bhakti, sufi,
01:59longing without an end.
02:01Love of the divine isn't safe, it isn't tame, and most definitely is not for the faint of
02:06heart.
02:07We have been through apocalyptic times and we are still in the tunnel, but we hope love,
02:13pure and unshackled, can perhaps bring out the best in humanity.
02:18Love is hope, even in all its shade, green, grey, white and the disappearing red.
02:24There are all kinds of love.
02:26There is love that refuses definition, the radical, the unbound, the kind that shapes
02:31new futures and informs new intimacies, and challenges the status quo, polyamory, neurosexual,
02:39non-king-positive, pan-romantic, a world where love is shedding its skin, finding new ways
02:45to exist.
02:48For those who are polyamorous, different needs are met by different folks, one could have
02:52different king partners, platonic partners and nesting partners.
02:57All of this leaves us in a state of flux.
03:00What is love if not the ultimate revolution?
03:03In a world desperate to name, control and limit, love breaks free, again and again.
03:10Love is a promise, it is the refusal to forget, it is the dream of a world not yet realised.
03:17Love is hope, it is war, it is surrender and fight, exile and homecoming.
03:25And in the end, love is the only story we have.
03:30Outlook Magazine's issue on love and loneliness tells such stories.
Comments