Does “love attract love?” No, do not ask yourself whether it is a million dollar question. Just before the partition of India (T and P should have been in capital letters), one man says, in anger, “an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind” (Gandhi). Whatever attracts B to A then means that B has already imbued with that – unscientifically oxymoronic. Only opposite poles attract – paradoxical. Do not conclude that hate attracts love and vice versa. In the ‘love’ phrase mentioned above, the outcome might be lovemaking, marriage or, if there is a glitch, parting with an emotional wound, and having to declare a writer’s statement from atop an ivory tower, “True love never did run smooth.”
Agreed, David hated Goliath and vice versa, but what made Judas Iscariot hate an enlightened shepherd who was seriously preaching love and other wisdoms; the shepherd was unlike Moses, he would not have brought pestilence to the malefactors; but why did a soul have to be punished for a few metal pieces; whose hate has begotten whose? Not dwelling in a cesspool of contradictions or becoming paranoid in the polemic, shall we think and (if possible) find out why the Middle East’s crust is always in inferno. Was Dante a Jew?
We were (are?) brothers: Indians and Pakistanis. The proclamation of freedom failed to bring peace nor brotherhood; it only opened the veins of hatred which was for many years buried like the live embers under the ashes of false love – one strong blow from the mouth of the ‘Divide and Rule’ giant, the ash disappeared and fire tasted blood; the tasting of blood and of hatred still continues in our borders, like in the Middle East, in Islamic States, in some pockets of Africa, among the people in the US, and more.
Gandhi pleaded the affected person to love his enemies more than before; Christ asked us to turn the other cheek; Buddha spoke to the lady who was cursing him who then repented and began to ask about his being patient all the time, ”Ma, only if I had accepted your curse I’d become depressed but seldom I have taken those words into me then how could I hate you.” But Moses returning from Sinai did not just walk away from Rameses saying, “What thou has sowed, thou shall reap.” Hate eats away at the hater more than the hated ones, but Moses’ tribe multiplied and formed a nation. Abraham or Ibrahim, the smoke is ‘still’ bellowing.
In India, there reign two epics: The Ramayana and The Mahabharatha. The former epic says how a man should live, and the latter says how he should not. In both epics, the climax is war. Thousands die and peace is restored. While the former epic was based on lust, the latter was based on kingdom, power and greed. In Ramayana, the protagonist Rama, never had even a morsel of hatred towards Ravana, the antagonist and the king who abducted Seetha, the wife of Rama. Rama even sent an emissary to Ravana to appease him but to no avail; to think deep, ‘there was “really” no hatred – here, hate did not wield the sceptre whereas in Mahabharata, hatred was strewn all over. The abduction of Helen resulted in the Trojan War but here, too, hatred was strewn all over.
How many of the pure white forefathers – christened as ‘pioneers’ – had seen the Red Indians in ‘their original habitat’ before decimating them – a genocide par excellence. The British organized the ‘Great Famine of India,’ The Jallianwallah Bagh massacre, the genocide of Tamils in their own land – alike that of decimating the Red Indians, the Nazis’ unquenchable blood thirst, KKK murders, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after Pearl Harbor; the endless list of mass murders – not counting the non-stop Jihadi attacks and killings – please, the wisdoms of the world, enlighten me as to how this much hate managed to culminate in any one human? Like in Hitler or in one group like that of ‘pure whites’, or in the Sri Lankan army etc. to wage wars that smoked out not only the lives of ‘callers of duty,’ but also the lives of millions of innocents and that includes the life of Jamal Khashoggi. The Desert Prince really did not hate Jamal Khashoggi, he just wanted the ‘spanner’ (JK) in the business wheel, I mean, deal, to be removed for the smooth run. What about the sentiment of The American Emperor? Answer: Numbness.
The reason for ‘HATE’ is ‘LOVE!’ I will cite only one genuineness to defend the statement; this is known to almost all the literate mass of the world, “Hitler loved Germans and Germany more than he loved others or their lands.” When a mother is breast feeding her baby, quite often the baby bites her nipple but would the mother ‘hate’ the baby? Apart from a simple ‘ouch’ and false anger she would continue feeding. In many events, when man fails to defend himself he actually hates himself but he cannot kill himself for that – so, his failure culminates into anger which personifies into a weapon – even his hand is one – and he wants to ‘avenge’ his failure by destroying the opponent. America’s war over Vietnam is one example but ‘his’ hands were made of Napalms and other deadly weapons. Presently, China over Hong Kong is a good one.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that the arc of history turns definitely towards justice rather slowly. A three-year-old boy’s body was washed ashore at Kos, an island belonging to Greece; his five-year-old brother too, died in the same fashion – both fleeing in a boat to reach Canada (?). They hailed from Kobani (Syria); victims of fierce fighting between two “Islamic” groups (2015); #HumanityWashedAshore became a trend.
Our days are numbered and our steps are measured; the call from the graveyard is heard clearer and clearer, day after day; tragically speaking, the days are vanishing faster than before. To which adage are we going to bind ourselves with; is it with “Hate attracts hate” or with “Love attracts love”?
The survival of humanity rests in the choice that we choose.