Three types of love

Dear Students,

Congratulation to all those who have passed the last exam and made it to this senior class. But all this congratulation drama comes with a big caution that this class is far more difficult and rigorous than your previous classes. So I would need you to concentrate more and be more curiouser.

Today we talk about various categories of love. You can see the slide that all love can be divided into 3 types of love: intelligent love, emotional love  and spiritual love. Intelligent love has a lot to do with brain, emotional love to heart and spiritual love is to soul.

Now try to understand each of the three kinds of love in detail.
I hope all of you are aware of 3 types of heat transfer: conduction, radiation and convection. If not, then please go back and read about them because love has a lot of similarities with the concept of transfer.

The first kind of love i.e. intelligent love has everything to do with brain. Your love is logical. You apply your brain to drive the car of love. The speed is regulated, the acceleration is modulated. The brakes are pressed with logic with a rational approach. For example, I asked one of my colleagues does he love his wife. He said "yes, she is my wife. I have to love her." Thats plain logic and also my colleague takes lot of vacation to take his wife for love trips. You see that intelligent love is more like conduction form of heat transfer. The hot body and cold body are kept to each other and heat transfer happens and they attain same temperature at the end. Have you not seen husbands and wives talking the same language?

The second kind of love is emotional love. It is the most wide spread form of love. Does not last long as well. The movies also glamorize this kind of love a lot and hence I will not delve into this much. It is done with heart, does not have much rationality to it, emotional love is like radiation. The person in love gets all the heat while the other person keeps radiating and is not much affected (unless later he becomes the one who gets starts receiving the radiation due to a certain dimension of time).

The third and the last one is the most difficult to understand and is the most rare of its kind. It is the spiritual love and soul is involved. This form also does not have much of logic to it and is a bit confused with emotional love (also because of the fluidity of it). In this form, usually the desire to own someone you love does not arise because physical bodies are not involved in this. It is a bit correlated to convection way of heat transfer as convection way of heat transfer is only applicable to fluids. There are some mentions of spiritual love in Indian sufi literature. Jahanara Begum, the eldest daughter of the emperor Shahjahan can give you a bit of inkling of such love. Don't worry I have arranged a visit for all of you to the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin. You will see some inscriptions of spiritual love there.

We will discuss this more in the next class as there is so much to it. But you have to come prepare to the next class with some assignments. I told you it is not going to be easy now.

Assignments for next class.
1. Read the book Lolita by Nabokov and detail out which form or forms of love did Humbert Humbert have for Lolita?
2. In the song Wish You were Here by Pink Foyd there is a line "We are two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year". What does that actually mean?
3. Read the book Godaan by Premchand (as most of you know Hindi) and try to understand love between the philosopher Mehta and Miss Malti. (Hint: its a rare literature piece showing all three kinds of love).
4. If you light up a smoke in zero- gravity, it would smother in its own smoke because convection is crucial to light up a smoke and in zero gravity, there is no convection. Relate it to the concept of spiritual love.

Please take the assignments seriously for proper understanding of the lessons.

Best,
vC

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The place and the teacher

The place
And that the beauty of life lies in its symmetry. That everyday grind, the day and the night, the seasons, the low tide and the high tide, the beating of heart....
The beauty of this place was that of a rare kind. The beauty was derived out of symmetry: symmetry of night rain and the day sun.
It rained every night in that place. The music of the rain falling on the tin roof acted like lullabies and people slept peacefully or even dreamt to that tune. And in the morning, they woke up to the bright sun falling on a snow clad mountain which had as many names as the houses in that place.
Another symmetry of that place was that each house had windows facing in the direction of the snow clad peak. The peak was visible only for a few hours in the morning as the clouds (formed from the melting snow) enveloped the peak for rest of the entire day. And probably it were the same enveloping clouds that caused the everyday (everynight) rain. The place was a self-sufficient microcosm of its own sort.

The teacher
The teacher was like that Byronic hero who is incapable of love, or capable only of an impossible love*. He suffered endlessly as he was solitary, languid and seeking to fill his void with his students. His course was divided into three parts: first was called Larva to pupa, second was pupa to caterpillar and the final course was caterpillar to butterfly and after that each of his students flew.
He was sensitive to the fact that teaching was a very sad profession, as a good teacher always assured that his students flew (like butterflies) at the end of the course and then the teacher is left back lonely.

The place and the teacher
The teacher sat by the lake after one of his lectures on how to become caterpillar from a pupa. He stared at the water ripples and he realised the irony that the one who taught actually learnt the biggest lessons*** and the ones he taught, he was not sure whether they learnt anything. The ripples, the rocks (arranged one above another) and the flags on the lake made him feel that it was he who was metamorphosed into a butterfly while the students always remained the same.

Later the sun started to sink and the everyday clouds came floating in his life, no longer to carry that daily symmetric rain, but to add colors to his (butterfly's) sunset sky**.....
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Credits: * Camus, **Tagore and ***Coetzee.

*Picture from the lake of Yuksom (West Sikkim)

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