Vinay Shankar Yadav

“whether a person can love books like they love children?”
The question itself explains the fact that love is selfish. We find certain satisfaction, pleasure, and emotional coherency while reading a book or watching a movie, that is why we love it. We cannot love all books though. We love those books that possess the values we are looking for. We seek for the worth and values its content holds.
Love, friendship, respect, admiration are the emotional response of a person to the virtues, values, and worth of the other person. We value the person, his character, his ideals, his thinking, and we love him, appreciate him for the pleasure we gain in being with him. It comes out to be a proper selfish response. Can we love a person whom we cannot enjoy, in whom we see nothing that can be praised and appreciated?
What book we admire most? That which provides maximum pleasure and satisfaction while reading it. Similarly, that person gains our affection, our admiration most that provides maximum pleasure, emotional satisfaction and moral up gradation in being with him. We seek pleasure in the person we love. Our love, appreciation, affection becomes the price we pay for the person to be with him.
We cannot love any person without discriminating him. We do not love all equally, and the person’s abilities, his virtues, his credibility becomes the scale we discriminate upon. We cannot love a genius and a fool equally, we cannot love a crook and a honest person equally, we can not love a thief, a rapist, a murderer and a self-reliant virtuous man equally. We do discriminate person from person. Not all are equal for us. How difficult it is, even to imagine loving all equally, without any discrimination?
Thus, discrimination comes to us naturally. We like a book, we like another book much more, and some books becomes our all-time favorite. We respect all human in general, we respect some of them whom we personally experience with, more than others, and we start despising some people whom we find out that they do not deserve any respect or trust, and then we even look for the best possible mate for us, we seek the right man/woman for us.
Thus, love is the emotional response of our own self-esteem, our own worth that we seek in other person, our own comfort that we find in being with someone.
Can love be blind?
One falls in love with the personification of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his most important goals or not-so-noticeable gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, matchless perception. We select the person, and we chose him. Our own sense of life and existence makes it possible for us to choose our friends, our love-mate, our partners.
If love is blind, if love can be just selfless, something, which we cannot discriminate for, which, we can squander along with all equally, than why doesn’t such love stay? As soon as we come to realize that the person we mistakenly fell in love with, is wrong, undeserving, corrupt or mischievous, we start feeling repulsion.
We may make mistakes in choosing the right friends, lover, mates; we commit various mistakes in emotional recognition because the sense of existence, the sense of our own most loved values is not a cognitive guide. Yet, we keep evaluating the person. We keep rationalizing, we use mind to find out if the sudden sort of love we feel for a person is right or not right, if the person deserves it or he does not.

Thus, we do measure the love, we discriminate and we rationalize.
Discriminations can be of various kinds. Discriminating is not wrong, discriminating on irrational basis is certainly wrong. For example, if we discriminate people for their caste, colour or ethnicity or gender, obviously, it is wrong it is irrational. Yet if we discriminate people on the grounds of their characteristic values, their abilities, their decency and attitude, and judge them according to their responses and temperament, it is justified. An employer wishes to employ the most efficient worker irrespective of the workers caste, creed or ethnicity. His aim remains to use resources in most profitable way and for that, he discriminates the applications for the job on his chosen grounds.
Love is a psychological process. We experience the psychological effect of a person, thing or event or activity or a condition, and then we adjudge it and retain the distinguishing characteristic, which helps us in evaluating the object or person or event. We judge its positive values as the source of pleasure and our judgement decides the intensity of our love.
The intensity of love varies according to the hierarchy of evaluation we prefer. As one can evaluate her love for ice-cream, or for reading, or for parties, or for freedom, or for the person they marries. Love, thus includes a vast range of values and hence the intensities. It includes the lower levels of love (“liking”) to higher levels (“affection”) to further higher level (“romantic love”).

If one wants to measure the intensity of love for a particular thing, person, object, or event, he uses the references of hierarchy of his liking, his values he experiences. A man may love a girl, yet he may consider the sexual pleasure he gets from her of higher value than the girl’s own value to him. Another man may love same girl, but may give her up for the fear of the disapproval of his love by others (the girl herself, or his family, or friends). Thus, he rates that fear higher than the value of girl for him, and he chooses to give up the girl. Another man may risk his life for saving the same girl in a difficult situation because he loves her, because all his other values will loose any worth without her. The girl can surely adjudge and measure the intensity of love in these examples.
Love is value aided, but unlike other values, it is not static quantity. It is unlimited response to be earned. Love for one friend is not a threat to love for other or family members. Yet, love is to be earned. Without values, love cannot exist. One can not love her father if he is alcoholic, paedophile, and wife-beater.
Even we can rate our love, our liking for various objects or events. If in a particular situation we have choices to read a book, go to party, write blog, or watch a movie, we rate all things and events, and we engage doing that, which we judge will provide us maximum pleasure, worth and satisfaction.
Thus, love is selfish, and it is measurable, the scales of measurement may differ from person to person depending on his personal values. Hence, a person can surely love a book as he loves children, values and intensities may differ.
Never ever say again that love is blind, mystique and immeasurable.