Valentine’s Day is the time to ponder how urban sexuality, its modes of experience and expression, are as much a matter of consumption as of feeling

Spring is supposed to be a season for madness. And there is something unavoidably absurd about madnesses that come and go at a certain time every year. In urban India, Valentine’s Day is one such thing. It is quite irrelevant to most people’s lives, at most a matter of indulging, tolerating or condescending to the annual silliness of the helplessly young (in age or in spirit). But watchers of the ways of men, markets and metros will have begun to discern trends and patterns. First, the bigots. The madness hits them unfailingly. Organized groups of Hindu men and women, fired by what they like to call swadeshi outrage, go about wrecking parties, burning card-shops and assaulting celebrants every Valentine’s Day. Yesterday in Lucknow, the Shiv Sena formed 11 “police” groups of 25 members each to break up parties and prevent the sale of cards. Every year, the press photos catch the same look of twisted unreason on the faces of these men, most of whom are surprisingly young. This too is Indian “metrosexuality”.

Then, there is the market. Valentine’s Day provides perhaps the best opportunity to ponder the globalized economics of Eros. Urban sexuality, and its various modes of experience and expression, are as much a matter of consumption as of feeling. The modern mythologies of romance are part of the same world of market-driven demands and fantasies in which Barbie jilts Ken for Blaine and an Indian woman pays Rs 45 to buy one piece of the first female condom. From simultaneous orgasms to candle-lit dinners, from saying it with flowers to doing it with diamonds, the playing out of heterosexual intimacy could be scripted as much by films, advertisements, weekend supplements and shopping malls as by the compulsions of the heart and hormones. Here the barriers dissolve, between the private and the public, and between expression and display. There are intimate words that can only be spoken in newspaper classifieds, and dinners à deux that can only be savoured in restaurants. How modern Indian men and women woo, propose, turn on, wed, honeymoon, appreciate, cheat, spy on and divorce their partners are all the stuff of a globally manufactured Art of Life, which can assume, like Nescafé and Coca-Cola, the colours and accents of the local market. Hence the paradox or dichotomy of an Indian Valentine’s Day. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning market of more than Rs 20 crore involving the activities, accessories and tokens of love. On the other hand, there is the zeal of the young puritans, quietly nurtured by a political establishment naturally given to censorship and prudishness for the sake of the nation’s moral health. Ms Sushma Swaraj still prefers to keep condoms out of sight when Indians are being educated about HIV/AIDS.

Valentine’s Day therefore faces the modern Indian with a choice between two madnesses, as it were — the shifting toyshop of the heart and the zeal of the puritans. Somewhere in the middle lies the art of modern flirtation, and its public and private forms of play. Even silliness can sometimes be fun.