The Phase of Red Haze

One day you wake up and switch the T.V. on to see a blast of red and pink and hearts and fur. If you survive that, you reach for the remote with quivering hands since most of your energy was lost when your eyes popped out and bled to death. By the moment you find the remote, manage to keep your heart beating and your lungs properly aerated (though I could be strangled for using such a layman term when I’m a pre-med), you realize that Valentine’s Day is just around the corner.

Poor old Saint Valentine (s). They could never have imagined they would be remembered centuries later in the ‘ultimate’ celebration of love. I don’t know if their saintly nature would permit them to be happy about it or they would just run off to a cave, take an oath of silence and spend all their lives praying to be redeemed of such worldly fame. However, if they didn’t have a nature quite so simple they could have realized that this fame could mean the success of their mission to spread Christianity, if used properly. As it turns out, they weren’t quite so fortunate because not only were they simple and faced severe persecution at the hands of the Roman dictators but the Catholic calendar refused to recognize their sacrifice and deleted their names from history!

Yes, I know their story is sad. But ours is grimmer. Every year, we set out to celebrate this day with an unwavering sense of responsibility. There are cards, gifts and God knows what not, perhaps all in the spirit of expressing unity with Christendom, because as they say “The spirit is universal!” But what if the whole idea isn’t Christian at all? We are expressing unity with Paganism? Plausible, but the problem lies in the fact that this isn’t even a real festival! It’s a mixture of Literature, imagination, confused history and mirch masala!

According to the Catholic encyclopedia, there are three saints by the given name who died on 14^th February in different years. The Encyclopedia states that Valentine of Rome died about 269 AD and Valentine of Terni died about 197 AD, all we know about the third one through this source is that he died in Africa. Notably, there are no romantic elements in their original biographies and this connection was created in the 14^th century. Those who believe that it was these martyrdoms that came to be celebrated by Christianity as the ultimate sacrifice for love are wrong for the following reasons:

1. Why would Christianity celebrate these ‘persecutions’ as the sacrifice for romantic love?

2. Christianity was not even prevalent at that time. The Roman Empire followed polytheism and roman imperial cult up to 380 AD. The reason why these saints were persecuted was that Christianity was unacceptable for the Romans. Why would these Romans allow a celebration that paid homage to a man they’d killed, when the killing was meant to demean his influence?

Clearly, Christianity had not by then decided to make such a big deal out of it, which is probably why they forgot to take enough notes about these ‘martyrs’. And maybe that is why these characters were an easy target to incorporate into a mesh of lies.

The first recorded association of these events with romantic love came in a great work of Literature in 1382. Geoffrey Chaucer, sometimes known as the father of English Literature made a reference to Valentine’s Day in the popular context in his poem “Parlement of Foules”. Chaucer wrote:

For this was on seynt Volantynys day
Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

["For this was Saint Valentine's Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate."]

This poem was written in 1382 to honour the first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia, which had taken place on May 2^nd, 1381.

It is invariably assumed that Chaucer was referring to February 14^th as Valentine’s Day; however that was hardly the mating season for English birds. It is thus argued by reliable critics that he was instead pointing to May 2^nd, (the King’s engagement day) which is the saint’s day for Valentine of Genoa. Being a poet of inenarrable profundity and having a wild imagination, Chaucer used birds to symbolize the King’s union with Anne, (hence the origin of the phrase ‘love birds’) and made a historical reference to another saint Valentine, simply to record the event in history. However, Chaucer seems to have achieved a lot more than that.

It has been proposed by various critics since then that the connection between Valentine’s Day and sentimentalities was indeed built by Chaucer but over time it began to be seen in a different context – that related to Lupercalia. In ancient Rome, Lupercalia was a ritual practiced between 13^th and 15^th February to offer sacrifice to the Gods in order to ward off evil spirits and welcome purity, health and fertility. It’s sad that they were deluded into thinking that their wishes were granted because their limestone gods were pleased by their sacrifice and remained unable to figure out that spring – the time of earth’s fertility came after February anyway!

Since this was also the time when most of the saints named Valentine were executed and Chaucer had already introduced the idea, a confused bunch of people – who did not know history too well – decided to mistake Chaucer’s St. Valentine and its context for some other events and construe things into something they weren’t, all in the hope of creating Philosophy/Literature or a place in history. This is how we ended up with what we now know as the spirit of Valentine’s Day: hearts, furs, red and cupid, love calculators, ‘u r da luv of ma lyf’ and the (mostly despicable) likes.

How touching, right? If only I had a heart.

Note: It is not the least of my intentions to offend anybody or disrespect any faith. I have written this simply as a service to humanity because I strongly believe that we get pressurized by the ‘flow’ and do things just because everybody else is doing them, without knowing why. This attitude is not healthy for any society because it reflects that we have an individuality crisis and I simply want my readers to know why we do certain things and that we DO have a choice.

Nature versus Nurture

Girls drift to the thump of the dhoal in the brightly-lit lounge, decorated with flowers by the bride’s family. Demurely batting her thick, sooty lashes she peeks at the groom-to-be, who steals a stealthy glance at her when the ‘elders’ aren’t looking. And the friends on both sides who can almost see the current buzzing between the two burst into giggles and hoots. The engagement was a reflection of the turning point in their lives when they would get married after four years. The lights around them blur in the moment when their eyes meet for a brief instant and the world swirls into a beautiful haze when their hands meet to cement the beautiful bond, to clasp their lives together with a shiny latch. Later they spend the night touching the gifts received from the other side, weaving their enchanting world on their respective ends to be knit together soon and also diving into the chocolates and other eatables received.

And the next day it begins. The buddies just get high on some video game booze or just hit ‘purple haze’ to celebrate the leftover bachelor splendor. But the other side has the REAL fun. Phone buzzing with calls and texts, all of which are brimming with teasers; asking for pictures and each and every update on the matter, especially what he said, how, when, etc. And then how could we forget the “Haan bhai, ab tou aap humein bhool hi jayen gi” accentuated by the high-pitched heeheehee giggle. And then they all need a thousand and one pictures of the ring from all sorts of angles as if the poor ring is a pornstar! It only gets better when they present the bride-to-be with tea-sets and china as her birthday gift since she is the ‘mangni-shuda khatoon’ now and the soul (whom I wouldn’t call poor) although sometimes flustered, cannot have enough of the raging attention- which is her natural reaction.

So she finally emerges with all the pictures and updates and the closer friends who are so privileged since they get all the exclusive details before anybody else does, consider it with unwavering resolve, their responsibility to spread the news as fast as they can to everyone they possibly can. What could be a better medium than facebook? It also serves as the perfect wooing network where they can tell random guys about the oh-so-lucky girl-since-she-got-engaged-and-now-has-an-identity-in-society, prodding them to perhaps offer for them or see them in a new feminine light since they were the bridesmaid and even caught the non-existent bouquet! She totally has to be next and if he doesn’t hurry… well, there’s not much to lose except for the high-pitched giggle. In my opinion, he will survive.

And then everybody who is remotely affiliated with the affair clucks their tongues and out comes a ding-dong or maybe a siren for at least a month. The giggling bunch tries to keep the vigour alive, tries to find new techniques to make it exciting and maybe fiery which makes the listener go all dying-of-lust perhaps. They do everything from making lame jokes (which are supposed to be probably provocative and get the concerned orange on fire by blushing), to listening to live repetitions of all the incidents since the beginning of the affair until the affair turns out to look like this (below) to me. Yes, it’s the orange phenomenon which in my small world states that engagement affairs and oranges have a lot in common. When either gets squeezed, it’s the source of Vitamin C in flesh (since the pulp is in the juice) but when it’s squeezed for a month at least, it looks like it came from Ethiopia two minutes ago. By the end of the month, it’s hyperventilating, and its skin has been squeezed so much that it hasn’t just lost the zest but also the oils!

1. Getting insanely excited about the engagement/ marriage of a friend or cousin, etc;

2. Always talking about herself, admiring herself in the semblance of a mirror she can find, pouting and playing as fragile as egg-shell china;

3. Talking gibberish in a baby, whiny voice with a perfumed accent and looking like a clothed skeleton;

4. Getting scared when Sir Bilal slams a duster against the wall and continues getting scared when Sir Bilal purposely overdoes it (OH GOD! IT JUST NEVER WEARS OUT ON HER!);

5. Being immensely self-obsessed and getting excited by absolutely lame stuff like a senseless picture of a friend’s bedroom wall decoration;

6. Being so stupid that the worries of life/ society/ whatever goes on around her do not bother her (since she’s incapable of thinking and having a wide perspective- she’s the subdued one after all) and she can always very simply go shopping for days without any of it ever crossing her mind.

It’s all so feminine- so stereotypically. Surprise, surprise, we don’t live in the Shopaholic novels. (Please notice and admire the use of symbolic colours!)

The stereotypic female loves playing fragile, finicky and dumb all the time.

Female: “Oh my God! My nail chipped, will you take me to the doctor?”

Male: “Oh it looks horrible, you chipped it? Get into the car!”

And they rush off to the doctor; you can imagine a siren in the air if you want. Oh and I forgot to mention that this pair is in a medical school- a.k.a. doctors-in-the-making.

But WHY does she play so unnervingly dumb? Because apparently men like it, it’s the perfect luring mechanism because it’s juice for a man’s ego when he finds a dumb female to spend time with. Oh, how he loves to pick away the splinters of everything the female doesn’t understand. It makes him feel oh-so-intellectual and ah, the sense of power he treats himself to when he can subdue, the dumb, weak vessel (was it vessel or weasel?). Face it: men can’t appreciate the fact that a lady’s intellect maybe higher than their own, even if it isn’t remotely connected to their area of expertise; especially when they need amusing company- who can make them feel bloated with their ego. Although of course not justified, it’s understandable if men do that. It’s probably an innate part of their nature or maybe it’s the protective side that kicks in when they see a stupid-enough-to-fling-herself-over-the-balcony-while-checking-out-her-reflection-female. But when you make that side of the equation zero, the constant that glares back at you is female encouragement. Men would never do it if they never had the chance to – the chance provided by the dumb-playing female.

The paradox is why does the female lower her self-esteem and degrade her intellect by acting like she can’t understand the simplest of things and they need to be interpreted in explicit detail by a man. The source of degradation in this case is the female herself who encourages men to degrade her mental capacity – an unforgivable sin.

After some painstaking assessment on a serene Saturday afternoon, I have formed a critical psychological analysis of the matter which suggests that it is probably desperation that drives them to be this way – desperation to feel accepted and perhaps loved like the oh-so-lucky engaged lady. The cause of desperation might be social insecurity, for which the women are not to be blamed, it’s an unfortunate idea ingrained in our minds since before birth.

We long to be loved, pampered, treated well – human enough; but to long to be a part of the crowd that’s all the hype (the stereotypical, superficial females who are so full of vanity) and be praised all the time is not human nature. Human = humble. I probably sound insane since I digress from the clichéd opinions but I know I’m not. And I don’t care how narcissistic I sound. It’s probably also because people find it hard to battle with their instincts with so much temptation around – that too is unhealthy psyche because it means that they’re making room for animalistic instincts inside their ‘human’ bodies, which obviously are so hard to shackle away that they defy sanity to kill their self-esteem and present themselves in a shiny silver platter (in which they can admire their reflection).

The underlying reason for all these interconnected issues of desperation and insecurity might be an individuality crisis that we as a society face today. I often find people exhibiting extreme copycat behaviour (excuse the layman term). They just HAVE to do everything somebody else does. I have seen people go to the extent of copying somebody else’s writing style and even adopting the way they talk! Females probably believe that their life is either with parents and then the husband and susraal is the final, supposedly heavenly abode. And there is of course no life on the bridge between the two stations. It’s just a bridge onlooking the gleaming golden river of life on both ends, etc. And also that they are to be borne either by some sort of family or some other individual: they completely miss out on the possibility of an individual identity. Since this is an ingrained and strangely obvious esoteric agenda, the giggling friends automatically, involuntarily begin dwelling upon the other side of the gleaming river and envisioning the prospective fiancés in a golden heart – because that’s the sole purpose of life?

I’m not against marriage or anything; in fact I do not feel that women and men are actually equal in every way, because they’re different. A cannot be equal to B; same is the case with the two sexes. Therefore, women should be submissive, however not mute. By submissive I mean not headstrong and selfish. The ability to compromise and understand is the most beautiful part of feminine nature and that means that we shouldn’t turn against men dreaming of banishing them from the Earth and sending them away to Jupiter on donkey carts.

However, a sense of individuality entertains the idea that life is possible without being somebody else’s counterpart and when life gives you that chance to be you, on your own, it’s for personal development so you shouldn’t shove it away looking for the next ride to cling on to. You have enough purpose in that life, the main chunk of which is to shed the stereotyped shell and become original, a female who is just you and not defined by how much she shops. There’s always a time for everything, so make hay while the sun shines because you certainly can’t do it by the river, no matter how much it gleams.