What is Love

What is love

Oh baby don’t hurt me

Don’t hurt me, no more

Haddaway in his wonderful composition of yore (later popularized by Jim Carrey, his posse and their superhit neck movement) hit the nail on the head. What is love after all? The one emotion which has never been defined. The one emotion which has inspired many an artist to his most exemplary creation, be it in music, sculpture, painting or any other ‘creative field’. Love is a beautiful feeling. To be in love is to be free. Love has the power to inspire, to drive you. Love gives you an aim, a goal, towards which you work tirelessly. It can be a beacon of hope in a despairing world, the light at the end of the tunnel.

So why is it that several of us have found it prudent to analyze it from a very negative viewpoint, with words like bias, favoritism and harassment flying around thick and fast? Why is it that half the articles are starting with statistics being pulled out from nooks and crannies of the internet? Why is it that most of us have chosen to write about love in cold, heartless fashion, berating it at every opportunity, and enslaving it with contracts and agreements?

Is it because some of us are unlucky enough not to have experienced love? Or maybe the system has ingrained into us the fact that organization and workplace (where, according to some of us, we spend ‘majority’ of our time nowadays) appear above friends, personal relationships and life in the ‘List of Things that are Important’

So is it wrong to be in love? Abhilash certainly seems to disagree, and he makes a good point. Love does after all give you an aim in life to work towards, the feeling of working to achieve something you can share with that special someone, the hope of bringing a smile to someone’s face, which is enough to make your day, improvement in productivity at work as a logical outcome. He goes so far as to ask organizations to actually promote relationships in the organization. While that may be going too far, I feel there could be basic expectations of organizations keeping away from personal lives of employees.

Satyajyoti speaks about romantic liaisons bringing about a lose-lose situation at work. “The time that is spent on flirting, sending sms and emails back and forth affects work” he says. But wouldn’t love contracts involving agreements on what to do and what not to do in relationships at the workplace be just restricted to two people in the same organization? Couldn’t one do the same thing with his wife sitting at home, or in another organization? And what about the fact that these digressions from work showing up in his annual performance results and subsequent evaluations. (Subheksha speaks rightly about it not going unnoticed in scrutiny and office gossip but she missed out on quantitative performance measures)

We come thus to the point proposed by Soumyo, who cites the example of Tiger Woods, and is of the opinion that we include love contract as a clause not just for office romances but in general about our love life. Wouldn’t this lead to a point (Ankit sort of headed in this direction but stopped short) where, before we join organizations, we end up having to sign contracts adhering to all walks of life? Would you sign a friendship contract, where all the friends you hang out with are regulated by your employer and also the consequences of not being friends with someone anymore, or a contract which binds you to spend your income on certain items specified by the employer, lest it be detrimental to the organization or be helping a rival organization?