Valentine’s Day: One Day for Love

I know I come across as a diehard Romantic and so this day is special to me.

My very first memory of Valentine’s Day is exchanging gifts with my siblings and cousins to show affection. We then grew up and understood that you really do not need a day to celebrate affection. But to this day I enjoy the time around Valentine’s Day and wait for this one. I am madly in love with my Husband and he reciprocates my love. However in our everyday routines we end up wanting to do something special for each other and just postponing it for one thing or other.

But days like our Birthdays, Anniversary and Valentine's give us the reason enough to go out of the way, bend our routine and do that something special for each other.

I am sure this is the case with most couples and I am talking not just for married ones but also the ones who have just started their Journey. Married or not all we wants is to spend a little more time with our Mate.

Days like Valentine's gives the perfect opportunity to show how much you can go out of the way to accommodate a loved one.  There are so many days we spend seeing people hating and killing each other and there is just one for love.

Then you come across moral police like the Hindu Mahasabha which says that couples found celebrating the 'foreign festival' in public will face a variety of punishments. While a prompt Arya Samaj wedding will be forced on Hindu couples, inter-faith partners will have to sit through a 'shuddhikaran' (purification) ritual.

"We don't know who you are but we'll find you and we'll marry you off." ~ Hindu Mahasabha
Picture: Swapnil Narendra

Now, if this is a 'foreign festival', then so is Mother's Day, Father's Day, Women's Day and so many other days. And since when India stopped celebrating the differences and diversities and accepting what did not belong here originally. I mean Hindi as a language has adapted many words from foreign languages (remember the components of Hindi; Tatsam, Tadbhav, Deshaj and Videshi?).

I am a staunch Hindu. I mean as Hindu as one can be. Mahabharat has been my favorite book since I was 10. Krishna for me is the Ideal Hindu Man. He never married Radha and yet their story is the holiest love story in our culture and they dated and did Raasleela.

The statements like the above from Hindu Mahasabha make angry. I as a Hindu never approved of their narrow minded actions. Why humiliate me by using the word Hindu for your narrow little obscured society. Being Hindu is being progressive and tolerant. The main philosophy behind the religion is “to each his own”, probably that is why we have 83 crore deities.

No one can stop me from celebrating what I want to celebrate. And to Hindu Mahasabha if you have problems with all things western think a million times before you take any of your family members to a hospital next time as Alopathy is a foreign form of medicine. And think before you switch on the light at night as electricity was not invented in India.