A Rose For The Moral Sainik

A journalist friend says she feels murderous, well almost, when she receives press releases around Valentine’s Day with the opening pitch,”Its that time of the year again!” And am sure if the PR companies could afford it, the invites to various pink champagne events would come with heart shaped cakes, a cupid blowing kisses and meadows of roses. The invites she receives may be cold, black and white virtual things but their intent is to promise everlasting bliss to all those who believe in the miraculous power of manufactured, prepackaged love.

It always amuses me just how integral the idea of what the day represents is to our emotional well-being today. In the West, apart from Christmas, Valentine’s Day is the worst time to be single. Hollywood manufactures special movies for the occasion where serendipity throws one chance after another in the loss strewn path of two lost strangers so that they can look up from their sad shoes, lock eyes and find each other. Why, Sleepless in Seattle is a classic even though it promises a soul connection with a voice on radio. Bollywood too has begun churning out February releases.

When I was growing up, the only gifts young people (if they could not afford diamonds or champagne) could give each other were Archie’s cards and teddy bears, maybe a stuffed heart or two. Now there are weekend packages, special lunches and romantic dinners by the pool side, bouquets you can order online, discounts on heart shaped trinkets, gift wrapped chocolates, bakery treats and even the cafes serve coffee with frothy hearts piped on top. It is an industry that thrives on the belief that love is good for business and it really is. Whether the pressure to translate feeling into a grand gesture is good for love is open to debate though.

The one good thing Valentine’s Day has achieved in India however is to give the repressed young in small towns a reason to celebrate each other with visible signs of affection, the few instances when their faces have been blackened by the moral police notwithstanding. Any occasion that gives the young a chance to express love in a country where an acceptable form of communication between the sexes is eve teasing and even rape (The national capital setting new standards in the above), should be celebrated regardless of its commercial intentions.

And all those who say, to give roses to our women is foreign to our culture should be asked if rape, female foeticide, acid throwing, eve teasing, dowry deaths define our culture better. Our ministers who blame women for inviting rape by wearing ‘vulgar’ clothes have no qualms about watching them being raped on their mobiles in the Assembly during a debate about corrupting “foreign” influences upon our sacrosanct culture.

Amazing that when Khaps order murder of their kids, women are thrown off trains, pinched in buses, dragged into cars and raped, hounded, maimed for resisting molestation and stripped in public, not one of the many moral senas in this country so much as squeak. But let them catch two lovers in a park and something primal rages and froths at the mouth. How can people hold hands in public and get away with it? Now, if someone was ‘teasing’ a woman in a public place, we would all stand and watch.

There is always the matter of the shoe polish reserves. Well, those can instead be used to smear scamming, porn addicted  netas, corrupt babus and all those who really are denuding the country of all its value-systems. So here is a tremulous rose for the moral sainik and hopefully he will stay at home this Valentine’s Day and let the lovers be. And if he thinks English is not a foreign language, maybe he can watch Sleepless in Seattle with a tissue and a box of chocolates.