Valentine's day. 8 years back, these words wouldn't have meant anything to me (still doesn't mean anything to me, in a different sense). My first brush with this came after I came to Japan, where it's a big event. Valentine's day is celebrated uniquely here. Before that, for the uninitiated, let me give some background on the origins of this day (after painstaking research done by reading couple of news reports and shamelessly plagiarising from them).
Valentine's Day began as an ancient Roman celebration practised to commemorate young men's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. Young men would draw a lottery from a box which has the names of teenage girls in it. The girl assigned to each young man would be his sexual companion for the year. Neat, eh. Well, the church, as usual, didn't like it and managed to incorporate it into St. Valentine's day, a 3rd-Century Roman martyr who is considered the patron of lovers, especially of those unhappily in love.
This dude, Valentine, was executed for secretly marrying soldiers and their lovers against the wishes of the emperor. In jail, he fell in love with the blind daughter of his guard and before he was taken to his death, he signed a farewell message to her, 'From your Valentine.'
This note is said to be the origin of the Valentine's cards and is a huge worldwide business now where people are forced to send meaningless cards with catchy phrases in it to each other to show their love and affection. In most western countries (meaning America), people send each other cards and gifts and this has become a totally commercialised industry, which is nothing new.
That's the background. Coming back to the Japanese celebrations. Here also, it's totally commercialised, but with a strange Japanese twist to it and a plus alpha. Japanese ladies give chocolates as Valentine's Day gift to all the guys they know. This is known as 'giri choco' (literally means 'chocolate given out of duty'. E.g. to boss, colleagues etc). They also give chocolates plus something special to that special someone if they have one or to the one they're aiming to have.
The shops are full of cutely packed collections of chocolates in heart shape or heart shaped packaging. Nothing unusual there. People giving gifts on Valentine's Day. The plus alpha thing is what makes the difference. Only girls give the gifts on this day in Japan. The genius (probably from the chocolate industry) behind this custom devised a new celebration called 'White day' exactly one month after this, i.e. on March 14th wherein all the blokes who got chocolates are duty bound to buy back chocolates to the girls who gave it to them. Stoopid or what? Two idiots with one chocolate.
After the initial novelty, I stopped caring about this till my most recent brush with it while I was watching TV news about Shiv Sainiks trying to stop the celebrations in Mumbai . The past few years have seen these customs infiltrating India, especially urban India, where there are massive Valentine's Day celebrations. “What?? How could this be allowed?” roared the custodians of Indian culture in Bombay and other cities. They went around thrashing Valentine's day preparations everywhere. Most of them were wearing Rayban sunglasses to protect them from the ugly light emanating from the cultural monstrosities like lighted up heart signs. All of them were wearing western clothes. Indian culture was prominently represented by the reddish (saffron? kumkum?) paste on their forehead. I hope these guys will increase their sphere of activities into more and more Talibanesque realms and provide more entertainment on TV.
Maybe, they could also stop trying to emigrate to some first world country at the slightest opportunity, slyly wiping those red marks from their foreheads, gaining a non-Indian passport etc, before they preach culture and patriotism.
Meanwhile India's only winter Olympian, Shiva Keshavan, 20, finished the men's singles luge competition in 33rd place. He was in Nagano 4 years back and finished 28th and the Non-Resident Mallus here had met him then as he was an NRM settled in Himachal. He hopes he'll get some sponsorship for the next Olympics and have his own luge instead of borrowing from Italians and Koreans. Maybe one of our fraud Cricket players can buy him one from their ill-gotten gains as a penance for fixing matches.