A Valentine’s Day card created by MAtt Dujnic

A few minutes before I sat down to write this piece, I received an email. It was one of those automatically generated mails from the thousands of applications on my social networking site of choice — Facebook. It offered to find me a “cutie [I’m] compatible with” if only I would select, in order of priority, my 10 “best things about Valentine’s Day” from a given list that offered the following options — hearts, kissing, dressing up, undressing, chocolates, cards and romantic nights, among others. If I had any faith in randomly generated evaluations, I should have cause to feel disheartened. The only “cutie” I matched with is my good friend from university. A heterosexual female, like myself.

The quiz, though, throws up interesting pointers on how Valentine’s Day is perceived today. There is now general consensus that V-Day is no more than a day for the exchange of expensive gifts and frisky poetry. The business of lovemaking is just that — a transaction, scoff non-believers.

I am perhaps expected to present a reasoned and intellectual argument in favour of Valentine’s Day, because too much has been written against it. I don’t know. It doesn’t celebrate a very reasonable or intellectual emotion. But this emotion has had the power to alter the course of history, inspire works of art and literature from the time language itself began, make fools of wise men and women. It has made lives more fulfilling, sometimes more maddening. Created scandals, caused deaths, launched a thousand ships.

Love — “the great intangible”, writes one scholar. A monosyllabic word, but it includes the entirety of life in its capacious linguistic tent. I don’t want to know how the dictionary defines it, because I’m afraid any definition would be disappointing in its inadequacy. Love’s lengthy etymology can be traced down to India, to the Sanskrit lubhyati, implying desire. But love is a desire older than civilization itself. It is a curious paradox, then, that as a society, we are ashamed of love. Or, at any rate, embarrassed to admit it. I am yet to meet a friend (or lover) who has boldly declared his love for another (me). It always begins as a half-spoken, nervous admission. “I think I love her,” they concede, or, “I think he is the one,” almost as if they wish he wasn’t, because that would make life so much simpler.

Perhaps this is what lies at the root of the cynicism towards setting aside a day in the year that celebrates love, that glorifies a feeling that makes us behave outrageously, in a manner baffling to neuroscientists the world over. There is something dishonourable in being festive about love.

I have never understood the combative fervour with which Valentine’s Day is written off (at best), threatened or even driven out (at worst. Think Mumbai and Right-wing vandalism) these days. The consumerist culture it allegedly propagates is derided the world over. In India, the problem is with a perceived threat to our own cultural ethos. What care have we for a priest in fourth-century Rome who went about marrying sundered hearts in defiance of royal orders? In fact, nobody seems to quite agree on the legend of St Valentine. There appears only to be common consent that he was canonized in the Middle Ages, and finds specific mention in Chaucer’s The Parliament of Foules.

We have our own legends of love, and the more powerful of them have to do with marital love. There are the myths about the maverick god, Shiva, and his consort Sati’s sacrificial devotion to him. Of the union of Shiva and Shakti —embodied in the phallus-shaped lingam and the vagina-shaped yoni — which was believed to have restored order in a chaotic world and is worshipped till date. We have Ram and Sita, of course, and their sanitized love-that-knows-no-bounds for one another, or at any rate Sita’s l-t-k-n-b for Ram. As a culture, we tend to couch our inhibitions behind religion. Union — be it sexual, romantic or marital — requires religious sanction. Krishna’s frenzied cavorting with his gopis is leela — symbolizing communion between souls. Your daughter’s evening out at the disco is just bottomless vulgarity. Give modern times a break, is all I’m saying.

Too much is made of the lofty notions of love. Whatever happened to simplicity? Not every man is a Shakespeare parading love’s immortality between his page and his pen. Not every woman is an Elizabeth Barrett Browning, counting the ways in which she loves. Granted that heart-shaped, gift-wrapped love doesn’t hold a candle to a well-turned-out sonnet or a Top-20 love song or a romance novel that rakes in fat royalties — but the candour is no less, is it? The desire is the same — to please the beloved, to express one’s love. It still is “How do I love thee?” only with, “Let me show you with a bottle of your favourite perfume.”

Is love, and its celebration, the sole prerogative of artists and poets? Why devalue the love of ordinary people merely because they cannot make original art of it, but need help from an Archies greeting card? The razzmatazz seduction of kings and nobles (and now, filmstars and French presidents) is looked upon with wonderment, but not the more mundane, retail-bought courtship of you and me. All the more reason for Valentine’s Day, because it’s nice to scrimp and save for a special day that you know you’re sharing with couples all over the world.

I came across a website in which the writer proudly challenges Valentine’s Day to bite her. “What a bunch of trite trash it is. Everyone runs around frothing, proclaiming their love... It makes me sick. If someone truly cared about you, I think you’d hear it more often than once a year, presented with a heart-shaped cardboard box... filled with cheap chocolates... and a card picked up for $ 2.95,” she writes, presumably frothing at the mouth herself.

Some of my single friends will be “boycotting” Valentine’s Day because its other name apparently is Singles’ Awareness Day. The Bridget Jones in them has resolutely banished the prospect of fun that this day offers, choosing instead to spend their evening in front of the telly, eating ice cream and badmouthing men, relationships and the colour red. I don’t know what to make of this unshakeable intransigence because I’d rather join in with the other batch that is busy planning a Lonely Hearts Club party. We’ll pop balloons, break open the bubbly, dance to good music and generally have an early weekend. But before that, there’s all the discount shopping. I mean, what point is there in fuming about Valentine’s Day and moaning “Love for sale” while you tunelessly strum your guitar, if it’s going to happen anyway? I’d rather jump right in and take a leisurely bite of that consumerist culture. All hail plastic fantastic love.

We spend a lot of time dwelling on hate. Fighting battles — personal and political. There’s a lot of bitterness and venom going around. Throughout history, days of war, executions, massacre — and there are so many — have been days dedicated to hate, to loss, to lapses on the part of mankind. Why not, then, a day for the emotional community universally bound by love? And if it gives me a discount at my favourite clothing store or jewellery shop, and gets me a complimentary drink at my preferred watering hole because I’m wearing red according to the night’s theme, what harm? Reason and intellect be damned, dear reader. I have a party to attend.