Much as the presence of the procreative Bengali female in mothers, aunts and grandmothers once exhorted young girls in the family to get married, the lost Bengali male in me chases after young females with the question: "Are you in love yet?"

Obviously, that is not an indirect way of getting them to consider me as a worthy candidate for partnership, because I am not, but a way of saying to them that they have to fall in love if they have to rise to being themselves. I follow up with the usual explanations: No man is perfect, but some imperfections make a man a lover worth sacrificing one's perfections for; love is a wound that alerts a woman to her permanence in the transience of a wayward world; and so on.

I accost my young male friends as well, beseeching them to remember that the physical strength and mental agility that fire them today will dim one day, and that they will then need the companionship of the beloved to stay the remaining course of personal time.

Given my age - I am a grandfatherly 67 - both women and men confide in me, some to say shyly that they have found a partner, and others to explain matter-of-factly why they have not. The haves enjoy the benediction (I hope) of my ageing smile, and the have-nots receive the reassurance of an old man who knows that, while there is still time, there is still hope, and while there is still hope, there is love. Go out and find love somewhere, in someone, in a moment that will transform the empire of chance into the republic of destiny, I say to the have-nots. Chance rules a person when she or he accepts the way things are; destiny awaits those who are bold enough to tell time: "Enough of you and your loveless world! I am taking over now. I am going to fall in love, come what may." Time will back off then, whimpering away like a dog retreating from the hearty kick that love has given it in the form of a young woman or man who believes that the best kind of immortality - the greatest gift of time - is that which is available in life and not after it: the immortality of love.

Tuhina

And so, as my questions went on, I asked Tuhina whether she is in love. She is 18, a girl from a Bengali village with a stroke-ridden father (my friend), a mother in a conservative rural family who has been forced to go out to work in the city, and two younger sisters to whom she has become a foster mother. (She is Ma 2.0.) Having beaten the odds, Tuhina is a first-year Honours student of history at her local college, where she is rapidly learning to transform the jagged edges of her circumstances into a sharpened sense of human endurance. She used to be gregariously extrovert till her father suffered the stroke a few years ago; since then, she has turned into an introvert who is parsimonious with feelings and thrifty with words lest she ask for too much from a sullen world.

Tuhina's reply to my question decentred me. She said: "I am in love already. I am in love with my parents, my sisters, with others' parents and sisters and brothers whom I have never met, with the cruelty of this anonymous world, with the defiant blossoming of flowers amidst the stones and the cyclical play of the seasons, with everything outside me, with everything beyond my control. Why do you ask me whether I am in love? Do you mean with a single man? Who is that one man whom I should love beyond this world of mine? Tell me, and tell me how to find him. But you must tell him first to love my wayward world because only then will I be true to him and to the jealous possessiveness of his love. I cannot go to someone who is not prepared to seek his destination in my runaway world."

Tuhina's words struck my ego like a slap. I recoiled in shamed horror for having dared her to find love when love had found her already.

She recalled in my mind a comment made about Socrates: There was never a day when Socrates was not in love. What that statement means, to me at least, is that Socrates would have had no need to be a philosopher had it not been for his belief in the power of reason to change the world. Why even argue if the subject in question is not worth the interest? Interest is born as the product of the self in engagement with the world. Engagement leads to a sense of responsibility, and responsibility means to try and take charge of the course of time. The inquiries of Socrates take charge of the world of the intellect much as a lover takes charge of his beloved (or the other way around). Socrates never stopped thinking for even a moment: That is why there was never a day when he was not in love. Love had found him already. He spent his days reciprocating his discovery by love.

That is true of Tuhina as well. She has found love in the sense of being found by it. I shall stop asking her if she has found the man of her choice. I shall speak to her, human-to-human, both equal citizens of a universal republic of pain. Perhaps I should stop asking other young adults as well whether they are in love. Let me assume that they are. Let me assume that everyone is.

However, should anyone be in love without knowing and acknowledging it, do drop me a line.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be reached at epaaropaar@gmail.com