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by Hana Ibrahim

Forget love, its anger that keeps us together! A recent newspaper headline about the adhesive qualities of this muscle contorting, blood coagulating, thought asphyxiating emotion has me paring off the layers of conventional belief and taking a closer look at fury and its assorted prickly relatives ire, outrage, wrath, pique, peeve, miff and indignation. And at also, like that pea in the pernickety princess' mattress, the waning glow of love.

Love, as the countless post-its and mushy poems tells us, is the zingy undefinable stuff that truly colours the horizon, rose-tinges the gloom, makes the world go round. And the Romeos swoon. The latter from the emotion or the motion, I am not sure.

Conventional wisdom and age old belief has also had us authenticating love and its warm-glow derivatives like admiration, esteem and respect to be the underlying glue of our relationships with family, friend, peer and pet.

But now, two Swiss (a nation described as being inhabited by the least imaginative of the human species where even the female impersonators are women) scientists have transmogrified into quixotic creatures and come up with an equally quixotic notion about the mucilage qualities of anger.

The two scientists, Ernst Feha and Simpon Gaechter, subsequent to an unconventional, off-the-wall experiment using 240 volunteers as guinea pigs, concluded that force that bind strangers together is not love or even self interest, but anger and fear of anger.

How they reached the resolution is a different story, but the pronouncement has succeeded in drop kicking traditional convictions, transposing accepted norms and putting a cog in the wheel of complacent comfort.

It also has me taking a closer look at anger as we know it and pondering the transmutations necessary to keep us peeved and pleased at the same time.

Also the fate of St. Valentine's Day that's around the corner, and of course Harlequin romances. The whiz-kids who transformed the tragedy of St. Valentine into a titanic commercial venture, may well have to deep-six red roses and heart-shaped chocolates this year, and contrive new fangled ways of revering February 14, now that love has been butt-kicked to being passe and anger elevated as the rage.

Perhaps they'll replace the red roses with dead roses and spike the chocolates with thorns, so that the recipient can reward the Romeo with a slap or two or more and keep anger fresh and pulsating.

Perhaps too, someone will create a series of wrath-influenced/influencing memorabilia to replace the cuddly soft toys and lovey, dowey, mushy stuff in the market and the publishers of popular lexicons will stop press to include an appendix of the new ire-rised miff-talk nomenclature that would in turn be trimmed to fit the short message services that are being promoted by a mobile server.

May be the 'heart' symbol will be replaced with the 'scull and crossed bones' sign, and lovers will call themselves vexers and find suitable words proclaim their pique.

'Love Will Keep Us Together' crooned a bee-bopping oldster, when 'Make Love Not War' the Woodstock induced aquarius-type slogan held sway, convincing many that the path to peaceful coexistence and to prosperity was brotherly love and deep philos.

Now with the Swiss conjectured pique- thinking, the next chart topper will probably be 'Love Will Rip Us Apart' sung by either Enrique or Destiny's Child and Edward de Bono will title his next best seller 'Getting Angry and Staying Angry - The Secret To Being Successful'.

Pondering the adhesive qualities of anger and the relegation of love to a place of inconsequence, also has me wondering whether the National Brotherhood Day flopped so ignominiously, because, the Prime Minister invited traditional foes to share a piece of kiribath and be friends.

Now if he had invited the antagonists for free-for-all fisticuffs and asked them to nurse their anger to towering proportions... Who knows, we may be writing about the national government, instead of just talking about having one.

That is however by the way, as is the transmutations. For irrelevance aside, the Swiss findings has me asking, what exactly is anger. And wondering too, whether traditional thinking did it a mega disservice by deeming it a negative, destructive, nothing-good-will-come-off-it sort of emotion.

Is there more to anger than the deleterious emotion that rules our passion, sidelines our intelligence, deep sixes our rationality, get our blood boiling and drop kicks our sense of well earned equanimity? I am not sure, but I am going to ask, may be some Norwegian scientists (they are described as being equally boring) this time around, to find out the nitty gritty's of anger, package it in an eco-friendly manner and market it as the 21st century accessory, supplementing the Mont Blanc, Filo Fax and the mobile phone, essential props of the go-getting psyche.

For, without anger as a integral tool, how can you have friends or even be deemed successful?

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