{"id":4131,"date":"2020-02-07T14:29:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-07T08:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/?p=4131"},"modified":"2022-06-07T15:07:44","modified_gmt":"2022-06-07T09:37:44","slug":"somewhere-over-the-rainbow-skies-are-blue-dr-suchitra-dalvie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/somewhere-over-the-rainbow-skies-are-blue-dr-suchitra-dalvie\/","title":{"rendered":"Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue – Dr Suchitra Dalvie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.
\nIt is 2020 and most people on this planet now associate the rainbow with the LGBTQIA symbol rather than the old Judy Garland song from the Wizard of Oz, which is great!

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\nBut as Valentine\u2019s Day comes around and in a frenzy of \u2018celebrating\u2019 \u2018love\u2019 as the media starts filling up with everything in shades of red, it is interesting to reflect on the origins of it all.
\nAll our cultures have been celebrating and analysing a whole spectrum of love over the ages\nbut in recent centuries has been narrowed down to the celebration of mainly (or only)\nromantic\/sexual love being projected as the ultimate goal in life. Finding one\u2019s soulmate,\nmarried till death do us part and all that jazz.
\nHow many of us know that the cute heart symbol we use wildly and widely has nothing at all\nto do with the organ that sits in your chest and pumps blood and is probably a simple\noutline of a vulva or perhaps the silphium seed pod, used as a form of birth control in the\nancient days! A well-known herb back then, even coins were minted in the city-state of\nCyrene that depicted the plant\u2019s seed pod.\n<\/p>\n

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\nSt. Valentine who died in the 3rd century, is the patron saint not only of lovers but also of epileptics and bees. Besides being a great multitasker he was also a subversive if stories are true that he defied the emperor\u2019s orders and secretly married couples to spare the husbands from war.
\nThe holiday has origins in the Roman festival of Lupercalia held in mid-February which celebrated the coming of spring, included fertility rites and the pairing off of women with men by lottery. That does not sound very romantic at all honestly!
\nA visitor from another planet might think that we earthlings are obsessed with chasing love and finding The One. If you asked the sages of ancient India , however, they\u2019d probably say that love is not what we\u2019re actually chasing. Instead, we pursue the intense but fleeting emotional high of \u201cfalling in love,\u201d which generally doesn\u2019t last very long.
\nLove itself comes in so many more flavors than we are led to believe. The Greek in fact categorized love and identified six categories . These range from the Eros or erotic love (which they defined as the most dangerous!) to childhood loves. They define self- love as the healthiest form of love which is also the Buddhist philosophy of \u201cself-compassion\u201d in order to provide love to others.
\n\nAll these also sound very worthy of celebration too!
\n\n\nLove, intimacy, wooing, sexuality, commitment, heartbreak all are very universal expressions of desires and feelings whether one is living in a high rise in Manila or a family home in Tehran or a hutment in Agra close to the Taj Mahal or a labor hostel in China.
\n\n\nBut the navigation of relationships based on any of these are negotiated so differently in all cultures. \u2018Acceptable\u2019 love is usually confined to the heterosexual- same religion- same tribe- same caste- same class- same everything category because patriarchy and capitalist and religious control depends on it!
\n\nNot only that but the belief that only a certain \u2018kind\u2019 of hegemonic expression of love is respectable and appropriate makes for people believing that every deeply affectionate relationship must have a label.
\n\n\u201cWhat do mean you are just friends?\u201d
\n\n\u201cMen and women can never just be friends.\u201d
\n\n\u201cAre they gay or is it a bromance?\u201d
\n\nMany people know the truth that breaking up with a friend is sometimes far worse than a divorce. But when the image of happy families and loving couples is constantly being paraded everywhere as the ultimate goal then those who are not quite there yet or are questioning themselves start to think they are somehow failing.
\n\n\nYou need to have a Significant Other, your \u2018other half\u2019 or \u2018better half\u2019 or you are made to feel as though your life is incomplete or something is missing. And then Keanu Reeves goes and wins the internet by taking his mom as his date to the Oscars! (Those of us in Asia would totally understand that because we have always valued our parents and children as our Significant Others!)<\/p>\n\n

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I saw this interesting Korean drama called Love Alarm recently which is about a phone app that rings when someone within a certain radius loves you. Absolute soap opera script but then one episode showed us mass suicides taking place because for those people the \u2018love alarm\u2019 had not rung even once in months. They could certainly have been saved if they had self- love!<\/p>\n

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The reality is, as always, somewhere in between Keanu Reeves\u2019 life, the story line of K-dramas and your own life! Many people are fortunate enough to marry their best friend and love each other till death does them part. But there are as many, if not more, who suffer a loveless or even violent marriage because society and family told them that that was the final goal and the only way they would be allowed to leave would be for their funeral. Which is often what happens.<\/p>\n

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While Romeo (who was 17 when he fell in love with Juliet who was 13) is seen as a symbol of romantic love, in one of the states in India the government has set up \u2018Anti-Romeo\u2019 Squads to deal with \u2018eve-teasing\u2019 and also for moral policing. Talk about mixed signals.<\/p>\n

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(As an aside, Eve was created from Adam\u2019s ribs because Lilith who was created by God as Adam\u2019s equal refused to \u2018lie beneath him\u2019 but wanted to be treated as an equal and was cursed for her disobedience and exiled and became the first Witch. Yay Lilith!) Interesting phenomena are being recorded now as many societies and groups are questioning these age old norms and practices. There was an article recently about women in South Korea who have taken to protesting against the patriarchy by refusing to cooperate with it. No sex, no marriage, no children. In fact the phrase \u2018sex strike\u2019 has its own Wikipedia page–the earliest example being from a play written in 386 BC!
\nAfter all the most powerful thing one can do is to not let\u2019s body be used as a tool in systemic oppression.
\nTrue love may come in any shape and form and sex and gender and age and language and race. Or it may not come at all in this lifetime. And that\u2019s ok too!
\n<\/p>\n

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There are also those who have found true love but it has not quite been a happily ever after.\nWomen and girls continue to be told who they can and cannot love and the consequence of breaking the rules can sometimes be fatal . The so-called \u2018honor\u2019 killings are still taking place in our part of the world on a regular basis. This is why V day celebrations are now also symbolic of anti-violence protest.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

\nAs our world literally explodes with new ideas and inventions and social change on a daily basis \u2018love\u2019 could come in the shape of a custom built sex robot , or in the form of a cyberchat room. It could be an asexual romantic love or a sexual Tinder relationship with no strings attached or it could be through Ashley Madison whose tagline is \u2018life is short have an affair.\u2019 People with pets will confess that the love they feel for their cat or dog may often transcend anything they can rustle up for human family members and friends! For some people the divine love and mystic love is what they seek.<\/p>\n

\n<\/p>\n

When our human colony settles in on Mars and eventually beyond, they may well negotiate love and romance and relationships in ways which we cannot even imagine now.
\n\nHere and now, you may love someone you have never met or you may fall in love with someone who died many years ago. You may in one lifetime experience true love, unrequited love, tragic love, lost love, gone love, un-defined love and so many more avatars!
\n\nDespite all the suffering and darkness the fact that we as human beings are still capable of love is itself a cause of celebration !!
\n\n\nIn the words of the poet Tenessee Williams:
\n\u201cThe world is violent and mercurial–it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love-love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being\na parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend. We live in a perpetually burning\nbuilding, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true. It is 2020 and most people on this planet now associate the rainbow with the LGBTQIA symbol rather than the old Judy Garland song from the Wizard of Oz, which is great! But as Valentine\u2019s Day comes around and in a frenzy of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":4138,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[481,482],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asap-conversations-during-covid-19","category-feminist-and-chill"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/06\/Somewhere-over-the-rainbow-DrSuchitra-Dalvie-05.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O7nG-14D","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4131"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4148,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4131\/revisions\/4148"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4138"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asap-asia.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}