Palak Naik
Jul 23, 2017 · 3 min read

Lust or Love : what’s the flavour of the season?

The birds and the bees talk.

Something American parents read guidebooks for and Indian children are never privileged enough to have;

So when I was of the age of having “the birds and the bees talk”,

I managed to make a theory on my own about the relationships,

That you like someone, you get married and you make babies.

The younger me had no clue of how pathetically this theory was going to fail;

And it did because I grew up knowing love is a very complex chemical aberration which instead of having 3 stages has a hell of cross functional flow chart,

Starting with attraction , friendship, fling /affair/ infatuation/ that eternal feeling of finding true love/ one night stand or a tinder night or just hating each other forever;

And then I saw breakups and patch ups and hatred and love mingling on the same string just trying to fit in because

The generation, the generation being millenials’

Here we can’t afford to watch these things happening to me slowly,

We are a fast generation, slow isn't cool and fast is never fast enough.

We live in a generation in which we want to feel anything and everything at once and at the same time we do not want to be held accountable for them;

We live in a generation where we lock the phones to hide one from another and yet go to bridge of love to put the locks;

We live in a generation in which “hopeless romantic” is just a work but “fuckbuddies” is more than just a word;

We live in a generation where desire is just a touch away and love is just a mile away;

A generation in which we want to fulfill our desire and yet we have to run to attend that meeting right in the middle of the foreplay;

a generation in which number of chicks who swiped right is more important than number of days you spent together.

....

But we are the smarter the cleverer the invincible

So we reject the 'all in one' hypothesis and accept the" one in each person" instead;

Person by person and experience by experience,

We became ruthless, unstoppable,carefree,careless,heartless,immoral, hurtful... And a Mess realizing this on a one fine afternoon while watching Blue Valentine and sseeing Ryan Gosling cry,

Such a mess !

And deep down while having those experiences you knew soemthing was missing and something not being right,

And I don’t know what is right and what is wrong

And it's not like you and I won't be able to live our lives without knowing the answer

But we're a mess and we know it.

Because I don’t know somedays I like to listen to Ariana’s Everyday and all her "good shit", And somedays my head’s under water but I’m breathing fine;

So I finally ask the Bard the one who taught us the love and the lust and hatred and the rejection,

Telling us that 'love looks not with eyes but with mind' And also wishing to 'just have 3 days with the love of life , 3 days of "delight" than 50 common years.’

I am again confused.

I start wondering why is my favorite love story still my parents' and what am I missing in it

Maybe just maybe, we lost it all to the impatience, to the speed, to the ambitions and to the technology.

Maybe love and desire go hand in hand and maybe love and lust is like Yin and yang, always incomplete without the other one.

And if you ask me that what’s flavour of the season, maybe it is Cake full of love with the cherry of desire on it.

Because both are needed to be felt, Together.

Palak Naik

Written by

A child whose escape route from reality is art, biggest procrastinator, and a doctor.

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