Life is full of ironies, full of imperfections – don’t seek clarity, don’t search for meaning, just live in the moment with whatever is.
The Week magazine, in their latest issue, have run a cover story on celebrity love children – those born outside of marriage, and from an affair, that celebrities have had. The story features Masaba Gupta (Neena Gupta and Sir Vivian Richards), Prateik Babbar (Smita Patil and Raj Babbar), Aatish Taseer (Tavleen Singh and the late Pakistani businessman and politician who was assassinated in 2011) and Rohit Shekar (Ujjwala Sharma and N.D.Tiwari). While all these people have made peace with their ‘unconventional’ identity, there is an emotional, unstated, underpinning to the story. All of them seem to be asking: ‘why do we have to be judged this way?’ I totally understand that sentiment. Fundamentally, any social norm that labels and categorizes people must be expunged. If you view Life objectively, aren’t all children – all of humanity in fact – born as ‘love children’? The act of making love, having sex, that furthers procreation, is the same among our species. In a way, it is the same biological process that has caused all our existence. So, why label one set of progeny as inferior and another as superior just because the other has come out of a socially acceptable arrangement a.k.a marriage? The best way to deal with such an irony – where you are judged for no fault of yours by those who have no role or business to judge in the first place – is to simply be who you are. As Masaba Gupta told The Week’sShweta Thakur Nanda, “Yes I am a love child. So what are you going to do? Eat me up?”
Don’t think of the result at all. It is a message of tremendous beauty and significance and truth. Don’t think of the result at all. Just do what you are doing with your totality. Get lost in it, lose the doer in the doing. Don’t ‘be’– let your creative energies flow unhindered. That’s why Krishna said to Arjuna: ‘Don’t escape from the war… because I can see this escape is just an ego trip. The way you are talking simply shows that you are calculating, you are thinking that by escaping from the war you will become a great saint. Rather than surrendering to the whole, you are taking yourself too seriously– as if there will be no war if you are not there.’ Krishna says to Arjuna, ‘Just be in a state of let-go. Say to existence, ‘Use me in whatever way you want to use me. I am available, unconditionally available.’ Then whatsoever happens through you will have a great authenticity about it. It will have intensity, it will have depth. It will have the impact of the eternal on it.’”