The end of hypocrisy… By Pritish Nandy

I love Valentine’s Day. If I had my way, every day would be V-Day. For if there’s one thing this world can do with more of, its love. I really don’t care if that love is fake, fickle, false, phoney or faithless. Nor do I care if it involves tantrums, treachery, tetchiness, or plain, old fashioned two-timing trickery. Love finds its own way and even when it goes wrong it doesn’t mean you must lose faith in it. Love, in that sense, is the only insignia of hope in a world where hope is constantly falling short. That’s what makes it so special.

To be honest, I have forgotten where V-Day came from. But if I recall right it has nothing to do with love. Valentine was the name given to several martyrs in the early years of Christianity. Later came St Valentine, also a martyr, whose story subsumed the earlier ones. For those who think it’s a Christian festival, it may amuse you to know that, in 1969, Valentine’s Day was removed from the official Roman Catholic Calendar. But that hasn’t stopped consumer brands from growing the event in size and scale every year. Since martyrdom is no more fashionable, the theme is now love. So those who chase young couples on V-Day and vandalise stores because they think it’s a symbol of religious colonization should think again. Its consumer colonization they ought to be fighting. Hallmark, not the Church.

Why is V-Day important? Because we have all lost sight of love. Ask people what they love. They will come back to you with the most inane answers. Some will say their career. Others will talk about their Blackberry Bold or their X5. Many will say that there’s no love greater than watching Sachin bat or Bhajji bowl. Some may even refer to Alienware. Last weekend everyone was in love with Midnight Romance when it won the Derby. Every day, we enlarge our idea of love to encompass all things on this planet but the one thing we are actually meant to love: The Opposite Sex. In fact, there are a growing number of people who celebrate V-Day by showing love for their own sex.  Without being politically impolite, I think a separate day to celebrate same sex love may be better. After all, we have separate days to celebrate love for our mothers, our fathers, our teachers, our pets. Let’s keep 14 February only for love as we always knew it, between a man and a woman. We may be an endangered species today but we were the ones who thought of V-Day first.

As far as I am concerned, you can stop calling V-Day, Valentine’s Day. Call it by any name you like. Krishna Diwas anyone? Radha ka Tyohar? Track down a great lover, any great lover from the past and name the day after him. Or her. No, there’s no gender bias here. Call it even after Mallanaga, prophet of the asuras, to whom the origin of the erotic sciences is often attributed. But if you ask me, the best choice would be the great 4th century scholar and sage, Vatsyayana. He was the one who not only celebrated love but found a thousand charming ways to actually teach us how to do it. Without his scholarship of all things wise and wonderful and his knowledge of how to put imagination into action, we would have been a lesser civilisation. We owe to him, his 1250 verses and 36 chapters of the Kamasutra, and the great artists who put his ideas into images, our victory in the battle against the boring missionary position. We were always suspicious of missionaries. But Vatsyayana pre-empted them many centuries ago by teaching us some of the most delightful ways to subvert the tedium of the entirely unimaginative missionary take on love. So, to celebrate our great Indian heritage, may I suggest we stick to calling it V-Day? V for Vatsyayana. No one can object to that I am sure. Certainly not the Sri Ram Sena nor Mr Muthalik of the pink panties fame.

Once we Indianize V-Day we can then go ahead and celebrate it in whichever way we want. All the fun stuff young people do surreptitiously during Navratri and Garba can actually be done more openly on V-Day when we rejoice in the great love between our two sexes. (The transgenders can have their own V-Day just as same sex lovers can. So can the khaps of Haryana, who could get their thrills on a V-Day of their own by killing kids for falling in love without their prior permission.) Hopefully, this would end some of the sham and hypocrisy we have become so used to when it comes to matters of love and sex. Instead, we could celebrate the freedoms that the great sage Vatsyayana urged us to 17 centuries ago when he wrote the most liberating treatise of all time.