Love in Jhumri Talaiya

In Chandigarh, lovers walk down the Gedi Route (the city’s lover’s path) brandishing red balloons. In Bhubaneswar, colleges sponsor special V-day events. In Meerut and Rae Bareilly giant V-shaped balloons are inflated and card shops do brisk business. In Hyderabad, municipal authorities are forced to shave off the bushes of Indira Park, for fear of lovers hiding under the leaves.

No wonder St Valentine’s day is a busy time for the Shiv Sena and the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. Love is rampaging through Bharat, threatening the hallowed portals of caste and religion, making St Valentine the patron saint of every lovelorn social rebel who demands an escape from the arranged marriage or from the suffocating morality of middle India.

The well-marketed empire of St Valentine is stained with blood. Sonu and Vishal of eastern Uttar Pradesh who dared to fall in love even though they were of different castes, were publicly hanged by their own families. Neelam and Vikas in the same area, also lovers belonging to different castes, were poisoned. A young Muslim couple who eloped without the knowledge of their parents were dragged off a rickshaw and beheaded. There have been scores of similar incidents when young lovers have been rewarded with death.

Love has even threatened to destablise the sangh parivar.

Sangh patriarchs were not amused when sexy sanyasins and brooding revolutionaries publicly declared their mutual regard. So perhaps it is Cupid who will finally defeat Bal Thackeray and Praveen Togadia by shooting off his flowery little arrows at the forces of social conservatism.