Telly-Guillotined by Shah Amrita;

Author:Shah, Amrita; [Shah, Amrita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2019-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

LOVE FOR SALE

14 FEBRUARY 1995. SHOPS AND fast food joints in Mumbai city were festooned with banners wishing patrons a Happy Valentine’s Day. Entire pages of dailies were filled with soppy prepaid messages from people with names like Nasir, Aswini, Raj, Auntie Chips, Stranger, jaan, Charlie and Bond. Radio FM played sentimental songs through the day. Confectioners churned out heart-shaped pastries. Restaurants hosted special candlelight dinners. Love, or some version of it, was most certainly in the air.

A traveller arriving in Mumbai on that particular day could have been forgiven for wondering, at least momentarily, if he had landed up in some western capital rather than a place with professedly ancient local traditions and deeply conservative norms regarding relations between the sexes.

The phenomenon was startlingly sudden even for us native Mumbai-dwellers. A friend whose mother had her birthday on the same day looked at the wilting flowers and soggy cake, the best that she had managed to procure amid the bedlam, and shook her head in bewilderment: ‘I don’t know what’s come over everyone.’

The answer was really quite simple: India or at least its metropolitan cities had been initiated into the global brotherhood of Romance Inc., the most basic principle of which was that the demonstration of ardour was an expensive thing. Consider for instance some of the options that were dangled before Mumbai’s amorous couples on V Day 1995. Endless love at Sheetal Again, a six-course Valentine dinner at Cafe Royal; Hugs n Misses at Leo’s Pub, cost: 400–2000 for two. Feeling ‘the experience’ at Shopper’s Stop, cost: no limit. Archie’s card, the absolutely minimum requirement on the teenage circuit, cost: 10–35.

More money was spent on saying ‘I love you’ on that one day than had probably been spent over the previous 10 years. And the single factor responsible for turning an obscure foreign ritual into a momentous event at least as far the young, westernised Indian elite was concerned, was the media.

Weeks before the event, Star TV’s various channels had been choc-a-bloc with ads, fillers and programmes on the theme, including random interviews with people on the streets of Hong Kong (‘What do you expect to receive on Valentine’s Day?: Flowers/candlelight dinner/diamond Ring’). Shops selling gift items announced competitions and prizes. Spurred by the apparent flurry, newspapers and magazines got into the act, carrying articles on the ‘card craze’ and the origins of St. Valentine’s Day.

By the time the day rolled up the hype had snowballed enough to enter the consciousness of a vast number of Indians and sent a considerable number scurrying to the nearest card/flower/ cake/jewellery/soft toy/assorted gift shop, a simple case of love meeting commerce in perfect harmony.

Then again what was new? After all what was the Indian convention of ‘arranged marriage’ (where caste, religion, social status and money were the prime criteria) but a semi-business proposition; a trade-off between families where, in many cases, the prospective couple did not even set eyes on each other till the day of the wedding? True, some movement had occurred in the romance department over the last couple of decades or so.

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