Love should be unconditional and showering it on your beloved on Valentine’s Day on February 14 for a single day is nothing but a hype and an farcical exercise. Valentine’s Day sadly today has been commercialized by hotels, cake manufacturers, jewellery and card shops, chocolate stores and flower shops for their own interest to mint money. The day is often abused by youngsters who don’t understand the real meaning of love and mistake it to sex and intimacy. Sales of contraceptives, emergency and birth control pills rise around Valentine’s Day according to chemists and this truly is sad and scary.
Love and caring should not be restricted to young couples but it can also be between a mother and her kids, between brothers and sisters or for that matter between any two individuals who respect and feel for each other’s good and prosperity. Many stories about Valentine’s Day has been cooked up and the most famous dates back to the 5th century which says that St. Valentine was imprisoned because he encouraged weddings of soldiers on this day. Time for us to break this notion and practice but let us celebrate Valentine’s Day each day of the year if you love somebody from the bottom of your heart. The best way to shower love is to look after senior citizens who need our support, disabled as well as sick, poor urchins who don’t have shelter over their heads and kids who are orphaned. That would be real portrayal of love and merely exchanging gifts and doing silly stupid nonsensical things on Valentine’s Day is actually insulting the ‘word love’ which needs to be stopped!
S.N. Kabra
(The views expressed by the author in the article are his/her own.)
