Reading the Shiv Sutra in Hanover! (Draft)
“If you don’t have the courage to dive in, you will drown.” A fiction based on a real Valentine's Day story from India that happened after Prof. Jayati Ghosh's talk on Gandhi and Economics in 1990s.
Kaivalya (Aloneness)
What do we not understand about love? This question was swirling in Magan’s mind just a day before Valentine's Day. It was after he read a paper about how so many Americans were reporting feeling lonely. He wondered why the centuries of meditations on this topic in India were not accessible to people here in the US: the knowledge about transforming one’s loneliness into the celebrated and blissful state of Kaivalamyam (Aloneness).
Magan found it intriguingly strange that Valentine was a saint who was buried on February 14. It felt as if a deep contradiction was buried in the day we chose as the day to express our love.
Magan wondered if there was some sublime message embedded in elevating a day of death to the day of love. Could it be that the death of a saint is supposed to signify the cessation of self —death without dying—is needed for real love to flourish in that we learn to become love rather than seek love?
With these ideas circulating in his mind, Magan was reminded of his experience around Valentine’s Day during his undergraduate years at Delhi University and its resolution on an icy day in Hanover, New Hampshire.