I’ve never been a fan of Valentine’s Day. As a teenager (especially as a teenager, perhaps) even the lead-up to it felt like too much pressure if you weren’t a conventionally attractive person. You were forced to watch as the other prettier girls around you were wooed with gifts that seem tacky in retrospect but at the time felt thoughtful. They held currency. I was one of the ‘unfortunate’ ones who only received an anonymous card from some anonymous stalker. It was creepy. I did find it charming, though, that my parents made an effort to give each other gifts, but apart from that, the whole event felt sickening and gendered. As I grew older and witnessed the Indian right-wing resistance to the day as something outside of Indian culture, one felt pressured again to regard the celebrations as something subversive in the face of censorship. I realised, early on, that what is, in fact, deeply rooted in Indian culture is the whole business of policing who gets to love whom. True ‘love’ seems to be an elusive concept within our culture, especially when you think about how Indian society understands (or rather, sidesteps) the notion of consent.

As a culture, we have conflated love with duty and obligation, which is linked to the need to people-please and maintain the status quo. We celebrate our addiction to duty for its role in nurturing a presumably non-individualistic culture. No matter how liberal seeming your familial environment may be, it’s rare for any of us to speak of contexts in which we were encouraged or enabled to empower ourselves by honing our sense of personal agency. For most of us, it has been very normal to pursue our parents’ dreams at the cost of our own, to live the kind of heteronormative lives that are in line with societal expectations, often at the expense of our sexual identities, because it is easier to live a double life than to come clean to our ‘loved ones’ and give them access to who we really are. Those of us who find the courage to deviate from societal norms are usually confronted with the ‘what will others think’ spiel. The morass runs so deep that instead of championing love, we valorise its opposite, abuse. Our societies are filled not only with perpetrators who disrespect both children and women by violating their bodies, but also with family members who go to great lengths to actively protect the abusers—usually known to the family—by brushing their brutalities under the carpet and continuing to allow them access to their victims. The fact that we legally have no protection against marital rape says so much about where our priorities lie. Marital rape isn’t even legally acknowledged as a crime. How insane is that? In some parts of the country, laws are being enforced that will compel unmarried couples to register not only their current relationships but also their past. Intersecting with all of this is our troubled (troubled is an understatement) relationship with caste, our inability to truly confront not only its horrors but our complicity in its continued perpetuation.