Why I Can’t Hate Valentine’s Day

By God, I cannot stand oppression and that is why I cannot hate defiance.

To be a part of people is not equivalent to understanding them. It is always a pleasant experience to walk at the road side, to travel in a bus but it is another experience looking into the sad eyes of those passer byes and passengers; to dive deep into their consciousness; to come upon the bitter understanding that everybody around feels the same. We all feel like captives. We all are prisoners to the mechanistic framework of this socio-economic system which shapes everything in our lives. Our careers, beliefs, rituals, festivities, passions, emotions and sexuality are controlled like a grand game. Somehow it tells us everything: what to choose as a career; what to wear; where to spend; when and where to eat; when to celebrate and what to believe.

But the ugliest of all these is the right of the society, tribe or the family to control the sexual expression of adults. The rest may operate under the blanket of false autonomy but this one operates in open, revolving around the absurd, hypocritical morality of its enforcers. To me it is some sort of misfired and tamed jus primae noctis which makes sure that adults are paired as per the will of a collective lord taking the appearance of the families or the tribe. Our middle class has added insult to the injury by importing religion, an eternal enemy of sexual expression, into its already cockeyed set of morals, thus creating a comically absurd, self-contradictory identity filled with sexual guilt.

I went for a walk today and it did not take me much effort to identify the latent element of defiance in the whole scheme. From the abaya wearing middle aged ladies (the red colour of their trousers appearing as a glance), purchasing vegetables from a street hawker; to the all too visible red attire of a band of college girls, entering a fast food restaurant and from the bunch of road side stags, mostly comprising of college students to the road side prostitutes (wearing red), the defiance against this sexual oppression is all too clear.

So what about question regarding the cultural implications of importing a foreign festival? My answer is in the form of another question: Is it the only or the first?

It is also true that most of the hype around this festival is created out of corporate greed in liaison with the corporate media. But again, is it the only festival that is intoxicated with this greed? Have a clear look and every religious or cultural festivity has already been contaminated with such commercialization. Religion in its own has become a great capitalist enterprise and sells under some attractive names and guises such as interest free banking, printed religious literature, and CDs containing religious lectures.

Sexual Morals

Why not then support and love this expression of defiance, this resistance against the invasion of social totalitarianism into the sexual lives, even when I do not find any personal inclination to celebrate it myself. A friend showed me an invitation poster to a dance party containing a semi nude (quite aesthetic) figure, asking me, if I had changed my mind regarding my decision not to write against the celebration of Valentine’s Day. (Answering him) I think that if I had resources, I would have sponsored a few of such parties myself just to blow up the hypocrisy and absurdity of the social morals that this society has cultivated and has borne nothing more than fundamentalism,  extremism, war-hysteria and hysteria (psychological disorder).

To me red is a colour of revolution and the red colour of Valentine’s Day is no different.