A pinch of Hope, a dash of Faith...

A friend of mine told me recently that he is an atheist. And I thought, “Good for you. It’s a matter of personal choice and motivation and I am happy that you have found what you believe in or not believe in”. He doesn’t believe in love either. Goes to the extent to say it doesn’t exist. Doesn’t exist?? I really do wonder does he mean love doesn’t exist in totality or if it doesn’t exist for him. If he means it doesn’t exist for him; most people would say- 'give it time'. It will come to you. But if he doesn’t believe in it in totality then the probability that love comes to him and he just passes it by because he is oblivious, are high. And then again, what do you mean by love not existing. Don’t your parents love you? They love you for the fact that you are you. They care for you as you do for them. They respect you and the person you are and they accept you. They love you unconditionally- without conditions, without ifs and buts, without seeing what they get in return. And that’s the definition of love isn’t it? Well, in a typical MBA-like/MBA-student/brainwashed MBAite lingo, love is nothing but a cluster of emotions, which manifests itself when met with appropriate stimuli. So, love does exist. Love is same across all boards. They way you express it differs. Ex:- Your parents and a lover. Different category and different expressions of your love. And so, just shunning this feeling and/or this cluster of feelings as non-existential seems child-like.
The funny part is that I expected and assumed this person to be mature while he seems like the opposite of it. He is almost child-like in his shunning of “love”. Reminds me of toddlers, "out of sight out of mind". Things don’t exist till they are in the immediate vicinity. Lack of concentration, preoccupation with the present and now, call it whatever you wish. Seems like my friend is the same. Love probably isn’t in the immediate surroundings, i.e., doesn’t exist.

Okay, so controversial topic number 2: God.
I can understand what my friend is talking of here. Love I always believed in. God was something different. I was an agnostic till a few months back. Actually as hysterically funny as it sounds, I found my God when I started my MBA. I don’t know the reason. Maybe I was out of doors to knock on when I entered MBA. And hence the obvious door and also the obvious answer. Or maybe I went through things – mainly pertaining to the issue discussed before this – and was forced to rethink my stand. Whatever it may be, I found my God and subsequently I found my faith.
Love and God mean the same to me. They signify faith. They signify hope. Believing in God, for me, is necessary because you need faith, you need belief in something other than you. Perhaps even your family would suffice. If you have enough faith in them, well…nothing like it then. But then again, they too are mere mortals, prone to wrongs and mistakes like the rest of us. However that’s not the point. The point is that you need hope. That’s how we survive. That’s how I survive. In the hope that tomorrow is a better day, that tomorrow brings me a day closer to my MBA degree, to my dreams. That tomorrow brings with it a better string of words, inspirations to work on and muses to gush about. That tomorrow’s advent will mean the end of today. And so I survive...in this almost insulated world of hope and faith and romanticism.