Has Valentines Day lost its significance with couples treating it as just another day? Once upon a time,the pinnacle of happiness would be reached on Valentines Day if your hearts desire threw a paper rocket at you from across the room with a scribbled declaration of love. More often than not,it would get entangled in your hair or miss its target and land on the desk of the girl next to you (or worse,it lands on your desk and you open it to see that its addressed to the girl sitting next to you). Of course,those were the days before love became a marketable commodity. But even with all the aggressive marketing (or maybe because of it)the metrapolis is swamped with sales,special offers,discounts and Valentines Day packageshas February 14 become just another day for the Romeos and Juliets of the city? Ill vomit if I see another heart-shaped pillow with I LOVE YOU inscribed on it, says marketing consultant of MTV,Vivek Varghese,who says he stopped celebrating Valentines Day two years back when he took his date to dinner and she ordered a Rs 65,000 winethe most expensive item on the wine list. Television host Cyrus Broacha has another take on it. With other days to celebrate like My Name is Khan day and Lets riot and destroy the city day,Valentines Day is getting eclipsed. He might have a point. With the Shiv Sena getting a new toy to play with this year,V-Day is set for smooth-sailing with the usual amount of moonlight serenading,candle-lit dinners and candy floss love. But Cupids (read flower sellers,restaurateurs and greeting card manufacturers) power is no match for the detractors of Valentines Day. I think its becoming more and more important as the years go by. Very few might know who St Valentine is but everyones searching for an excuse to celebrate love, says Kunal Vijaykar. Empirical evidence supports his theory. According to Pramod Arora,joint managing director of Archies,there has been a 10-12 per cent increase in sales in the week leading to Valentines Day. For the first time,Archies has launched a series of five cards for gays and lesbians. Two of the designs are already sold out. Valentines Day,apart from being a day for celebration among lovers,has now gone one step ahead as,today,it encompasses the entire spectrum of family and friends, says Arora. Tickets for rom-coms like Garry Marshalls Valentines Day were selling like hot cakes at all the multiplexes on Friday. Hallmark has breathed life into a memorabilia from another era: the love letter,with slanting words on parchment paper and packed with enough sugar to give you diabetes on sight. (At my first sight of you,I drowned in the limpid pools of your opal eyes.) Over 3.6 lakh Indians checked shaadi.coms newly introduced Valentine Quotient,which,according to Gourav Rakshit,business head,shaadi.com,is a move to help those looking for love. For the single cavalcade of the city whose self-confidence has gone AWOL with all this talk of love,we recommend a few episodes of Sex and the City. If there was no one to snap up Sarah Jessica Parker till Mr Big came along,the fault must surely lie with the system and not you.
