Valentine’s Day: Is it Mohabbat Zindabad or Zamana Ko Dikhana Hai?

February 14 is one helluva day for guys and gals, floating on a lavender cloud, totally lost in their very own game of love! Different degrees of hysterical and hi-decibel anticipation and action accompanies V Day. The one day when the cupid-struck mob have the sanction to openly demonstrate their version of pyaar, mohabbat, ishq to their very special soul-mate! Offers a candid and forthright 28 year old, Vicky Kapoor, an Ad person.

“In today’s insanely busy 24x7 life, choc-a-bloc with stress, tensions and anxieties, occasions and opportunities relating to love is mostly limited to stolen moments. Sure, the emotions, feelings and sentiments are there but the chance and more importantly, the appropriate ambience, setting, time and occasion is non-existent. V Day is a blessing in disguise, because for hot-blooded guys like us, it provides the perfect platform to SHOW how much we love HER! It’s the ONE time we can freak out and let our imagination go wild in the endeavour to express our feelings. We can actually metaphorically let it all hang out! V Day for us, is the real Big O!”

Petite Parul Khanna, a 18 year old, second year student, is much more restrained. “For me, V Day is a glorious day, both in terms of romance and bonding. If you are romantically aligned, then it’s that SPECIAL day to show much you care for your beloved. If you aren’t no probs, because bonding with friends, cousins and family or whoever you love comes with the V Day territory, in India. Unlike the West, this day goes beyond just boy-girl romance to embrace a joyous re-affirmation of relationships and the more passionate, colourful and dramatic, the better!”

Wonderful, but let's just do a quick flip side of this whole V Day hungama and take a hard look of the poor, unfortunate souls who DON’T have anyone special, the sad constituency that DON’T receive or offer the mandatory Cards and Roses. In this crushingly competitive, peer-pressure-driven, “guess what my guy gave me for V Day?” zone, can you ever even begin to imagine what these poor guys and gals go thru.

Confesses Vandana, a 20-year old college going co-ed, “I pretend to chill and remain indifferent BUT, somewhere, I feel alienated, isolated, strangely eased out of a crowd where I belong. It’s not a nice feeling …” as college buddy Priya adds “spot-on! Till last year, I had no one and it was quite horrible being a passive on-looker to this great pyaar-mohabbat-numaiyush exploding all around you! This year it was different … it was (blushes) bliss, yaar!”

“So, whatever people say, kids do feel a sense of being “left out” if they don’t have their “partner” on V Day, confides another pal Mala “It’s such a huge thing with the Gen X crowed that even if they are hermits for eleven months in the year, a month before V Day, solid chakkar chalate to ensure that they don’t go solo on that day! They won’t admit, but it’s the REAL truth, boss!”

Cut to another aspect, what about guys and gals whose “Valentine surprise gifts” have disappointed them? In the year 2018 (it is reported) that Roses, for many new-age guys and dolls, were considered corny, passé, old-fashioned, boring, but there is strong preference for more solid and substantial [read: expensive] offerings! Where does that leave the romantic lover cocooned in his old-world notions of love dressed in the garb of Romeo and Majnu? Confused? Disillusioned? Heart-broken? In the dog house?

A behavioral scientist observes with part-amusement, part-regret “Let’s take this big, fat, Valentine’s Day bazaar and put it in perspective. To begin with, doesn’t it appear a little dumb that the defining emotion that rules our lives is allocated just one lousy day for public airing? The hype and hoopla that attends this madness appears to underscore one simple truth, rather dramatically, that the celebration of V Day as a ritual and festival clean hijacks the essence of what the day stands for. That Marketing and Merchandising call the shots while the heart is really under a cloud. That, everything considered, is nothing more than a hi-pitched, smartly-orchestrated ad campaign glamorously flaunting a product called love, a blatant, calculated commodification of a sentiment that makes the world go round … a total, vulgar, commercialisation of what the poet has eulogised as ‘a many splendored thing’. It’s the April rose that only grows in the early spring. Its nature’s way of giving, a reason to living, the golden crown that makes a man a king.”

In a savagely consumerist society which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing, is V Day a way of looking at a celebration, keeping pace with the tone, tenor and testosterone of the times or is it a cynical, vulnerable acceptance of a global phenomenon that falls prey to help less hollow emotional posturing?