An Idea Whose Time Never Comes?

Last night, I saw the new movie Jodha Akbar. A story about a marriage of political convenience that became a true partnership of love. It was a sort of fictionalised history with considerable poetic license. A slow film that somehow could not get the audience involved in two larger-than-life historical figures. I got the feeling that the makers of the film were trying to set a romantic story against a background in which political passions ran high, but not the romantic passion. A little confused perhaps.

There is another movie, Cheeni Kum, which has been on my mind recently -- the story of an older man and a much younger woman falling in love, and the complications of getting people around them -- friends, family, social circles -- to accept that perhaps such a love was possible, and that it could succeed to be in the face of almost insurmountable odds. Love can be so hard.

I find it a little strange that recent surveys of workplace relationships evoke surprising degree of blase-ness (I couldn't find the appropriate word!); respondents to the survey said that relationships -- even 'forbidden' ones like extra-marital affairs -- in the workplace were all right as long as they were not disruptive to the work environment. Have we become ready to accept reality, and not ignore it hoping it will go away?

But here's what I cannot understand. Why is it then that a relationship between an much older man and a young woman faces such opposition? For a people who are never tired of the greatest love stories and are moved so much by them, even dream of having such a love in our own lives, why won't we give it a chance when it happens?

Why should something so good, so wonderful, so rare, be so resisted? Don't we trust true love when it comes? Or is it that we believe, that like everything else, love has a season, a season of youth, but not for middle age? Why do we bullshit ourselves with ideas that age is a state of mind, but trot out pragmatic solutions and theories about why such an idea is dangerous?

I see two possibilities: one, the ideas are wrong, but we are all knowingly self-delusional and pretend they are right. Or else, the ideas are right: we'd rather be self-delusional about our capacity for love and just refuse to accept it. Which means we lack the courage of our convictions.