Willing To Be Destroyed For Love?

I love Bollywood films. Don’t you? Yeah, I know it tends to get a bit too stereotyped sometimes but if you search hard enough, some of them are still able to entertain us to the maximum level. Some of them make us feel happy, sad, odd, weird, serious and even philosophical. In my personal experience, I like them a lot due to the usage of many of the characters’ emotions in the storyline.

I had recently watched one such as those. Fanaa, produced on 2006 with Aamir Khan and Kajol as the leads, is at the first half, a typical Indian love story – killer-looking guy with a killer bod encountered a blind sweet-looking girl with a flair for poetry. A few meetings later made in less than three days, they fell in love. And there I was, complaining about the unrealistic notion of falling in love within days [but hell, if a guy looking like Aamir Khan came up to me with a poetic declaration of love, God knows how’d I react. Subhanallah indeed!] The girl ended up doing ‘it’ with him and had an eye operation, only to gain her sight back with the sad news of her lover’s death. DANG!! Didn’t see that one coming, did you?

Here are some pics for your pleasure...




However, of course, the scriptwriter, in the effort of proving that he is not one cliché dude, transformed Rehan [the hero] from the cheeky naughty tour guide into the intelligent, most wanted and most dangerous terrorist ever graced the Indian terrorism industry. Nevertheless, the love he had for Zooni was as real as it can get. He returned to her life seven years later in a process of completing a deadly mission which could cause 5 million deaths in India, got distracted by his old flame, married her and lived a quiet happy life for a short period of time. Then, he decided to continue his mission and she, in the effort of stopping him from committing anymore wrongdoings, shot him to his death. The ending, for me, is foreseeable. Even though he was the film’s hero, he was an evil bombing one. He had to die sooner or later or else the story would be conveying a different type of moral message to its viewers of which I’m sure the director wouldn’t want that to happen.

The type of love featured in this film is the hardcore-romantic to-die-for one. Both leads fell madly in love that they were willing to drop the ‘veil of decency’ [that’s a direct quote from its song] with each other. As an anti-sentimentalist, I feel like puking but on the other hand, it is a very interesting subject to explore. Can someone love another so much? [again, a direct quote from Aamir’s dialogue]. As I myself have never been in love before, I am not in the right place to judge; neither am I a terrorist fighting for my home state’s independence or a blind girl with the most optimistic view on life. However, I am most attracted to the film’s very philosophical dialogues. Many of them really got me thinking, proving that this is not just a typical Indian love story. As much as cheesy the storyline might get; many of the script lines can actually serve as advices for other people. One of them goes like this;

“Give your life to the one who gives you his love, but give your self-respect only to the one who is willing to be destroyed for your love.”

What a great thought, don’t you think? And a complicated one to understand as well. I interpret this based on my own understanding – the first line presents a notion of a great love but the second one presents a much greater and more intense one. It also differentiates the people who ‘love you’ and the ones who are ‘willing to be destroyed for your love’. I guess that the latter category is almost impossible to find – what martyrs must they be if they even exist. As for me, I’m too selfish to destroy myself for love. I’ve always believed that it is most important to love ourselves more than we love other people. Looking at it in terms of sacrificing for the one we love – that is possible and it happens every day. But it is quite inaccurate to put it as ‘willing to be destroyed for your love’, instead the right phrase should be ‘willing to be destroyed for the love he or she has for you’.

Why? Because if you truly love someone, the matter of whether he or she returns your love or not remains a secondary issue. The first one is to see the person you love happy, alive and well. Even the one-sided love should be enough to keep you happy in the midst of the lovelorn longing you must’ve been hiding within you. We can never really know the extent of the love one has for us – the only thing we can be sure of is the extent of love we have for the person we care about. And that kind of feelings is the one responsible for pushing and encouraging us to commit sacrifices for those very lucky people. Oh, Fanaa, baby, Fanaa! [btw, in case any of you don’t understand, Fanaa means ‘destroyed’]

Now I’m beginning to feel dizzy solving all these love equations in my head. Love… such complexity!