Love From An Angle

Juliet was an idiot, for starters, she falls for the one guy she knows she cannot have than she blames fate for her own bad decision. Some explains that when fate comes into play, choice sometimes goes out the window. At a young age I have learnt that love, like life is about taking choices and fate has nothing to do with it. Everyone thinks it’s so romantic, Romeo and Juliet, and how sad. But, if Juliet was stupid enough to fall for the enemy, drink a bottle of poison and go to sleep in a mausoleum, she deserved whatever she got. - Meredith, Grey’ Anatomy.

Here is a one way of viewing the concept of 'love" to a few people in Bangladesh. Love to some, if you had noticed carefully, might be a result of frustration, peer pressure and loneliness and have no resemblance to the real concept of unconditional love that exists within people in normal life. Even a decade ago, it was a taboo to even think of forming bonds of mild friendship resembling romance, let alone actually fall in love and have a relationship.

Recently, with the evolution of technology and global outlook, romance has gained popularity status. In the few cases, it can be seen that young children, even at playgroup or kindergarten are calling out “I love you” because they saw it on TV and think it’s cool. Some teenagers throng around, looking for someone to fulfill their different levels of loneliness by having someone to shoulder psychological depressions, family turmoil and personal troubles, not to mention assist them with assignments. Some young adults marry to benefit their family lineage and have another shoulder that would replace more loneliness piled up from emotional baggage of their teenage past, mere responsibility, pressure and stress and some people existing in the elder generation, tend to fall in love with younger people to satisfy a strange desire to feel younger.

So if Shakespeare were alive today and lived in this strange part of Bangladesh in the lives of these people; would he have written a revised format of the famous love story “Romeo and Juliet” and named it "Babul Ar Rohima Keno Kandlo", specialized just for these special cases where 'love' apparently exists? And, in the end, would Rohima have drank a bottle of poison or poisoned Babul instead?