Vinnaithaandi Varuvaaya

The title means something like jump from heaven and come to me :) I came across this recent ARR album and the title song is clearly of the vellai pookkal genre. Mannipaaya is lovely too moving beautifully between Shreya and ARR.

Rajneeti is getting good reviews. Mora piya is classical khayaal fusion - I'm surprised how easy it is to intrigue the audience over and over again - Aadesh Sh. used the same stuff in tujh sang baandhi dor and baawri piya ki - in fact, I think mora piya is nowhere up there - perhaps ranbir and katrina jodi on screen makes the goosebumps persist. I'm yet to absorb the other two numbers - ishq barse and dhan dhan dharti.

I heard nice things about MM Kream in Vedam. I find only the last two tracks Vedam and E Chikati (the best one) worth listening. I seriously don't like heavy arrangements of the above kind whether it comes from ARR or anyone else.

and yes, I'll be at the ARR concert on June 12th.

love is an illusion?

I found this writeup on analysis of love - don't know why the guy chooses/needs to reason in/out of a doode called Schopenhauer. Still, interesting set of arguments. What I found more exposing was a comment to that post, which I inline here.

Romantic love is two people projecting onto each other, and mirroring that projection, for so long as it takes a child to be born and raised.
Think about it: the “honeymoon period” subsides when the bonding chemicals do, which is typically up to two years, long enough to get pregnant, maintain the pregnancy, and birth the child. (All periods when a woman’s mobility is reduced and she requires more food for functioning = therefore needs a protective, hunting, man.)
Unfortunately, the way we’ve set up nuclear families in our society, the expectation is that two people will live physically and emotionally closely for 50+ years; long after the bonding chemicals have subsided. To me, this is absurd – and pointless.
Romantic love is a high, anything after the “honeymoon period” ends is a mutually advantageous contract for raising children in *our* society (it’s preposterous that child-raising falls on the shoulders of one person in Western “civilisation”), an obligation, and more often than not a habit against loneliness that is rewarded by governments and peers.
There’s nothing wrong with that — but I wish people wouldn’t pretend that it’s otherwise.

I went ahead looking for more theories and definitions. Here is a contrasting claim from yahoo answers.

Love is not an illusion. It is the Greatest Gift that Nature has given this Universe. Love is the Inherent quality which is keeping this Universe afloat.

Love represents a range of human emotions and experiences related to the senses of affection and sexual attraction. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure to intense interpersonal attraction. This diversity of meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

As an abstract concept love usually refers to a strong, ineffable feeling towards another person. Even this limited conception of love, however, encompasses a wealth of different feelings, from the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love to the nonsexual. Love in its various forms acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts.

"Love is everything it's cracked up to be. That's why people are so cynical about it...It really is worth fighting for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don't risk everything, you risk even more."