Anshu Lal - What is love? Bajrang Dal, Durga Vahini have the answer ahead of Valentine's Day
It's that time of the year again, folks. It's the time when love (or lust) is in the air, couples
exchange gifts with each other, they come up with new but cheesy ways to say
how much they adore each other. Singles (pointlessly) feel sad, while some
pretend that the day is like any other. But come every Valentine's Day, our
good ol' politicians outrage and try teaching the youth the 'proper' way to
love. Because after all, what is love? Baby don't...
If Jim Carrey grooving to the song 'What is love'
by Haddaway didn't answer that question for you, don't worry. Because who else
knows what love actually is better than Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini? On Thursday, members from Bajrang Dal (the youth wing of the
Vishwa Hindu Parishad) and Durga Vahini (the women's wing of the VHP) burnt
Valentine's Day greeting cards in Hyderabad, reported ANI.
But perhaps the most cheerful and endearing part of this
incident was the important life lesson which members of both the organisations
had for the youth. "Love shouldn't be for one day, don't celebrate Valentine's
Day," ANI quoted some of the members as saying.
This logic is so mind-blowing that it can be used to reduce
pollution. Diwali, after all, is celebrated because it is the festival of
lights. But, wait a minute. Light (literally or metaphorically speaking) should
always be present in a person's life, much like 'love'. According to Bajrang
Dal and Durga Vahini logic then, light shouldn't only be celebrated for a day.
Thus, Diwali shouldn't be celebrated, which then would take care of a lot
of pollution.
In fact, this logic can be used to ban all festivals.
Because all festivals, like Valentine's Day, are about celebrating something
positive which should always be present in a person's life. Isn't that the
whole point of a festival?
Celebrating love, lust or infatuation — irrespective of the
duration of time for which it is present in your life — for one day is as wrong
(or maybe right?) as celebrating anything else for one day. If we all began following Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini
logic, we'd have no festivals. In other words, something like this would end up
happening:
Another important life lesson which these organisations
taught us is that irrespective of what you actually think love is, you will
never really know what love is until you thrust that idea of love down other
people's throats. Till today, different people have different ideas of love.
Some people celebrate Valentine's Day and others choose to ignore it because
they think it is stupid and cheesy.
But the key difference between common people and the
enlightened Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini activists is that common people don't
impose their views on others. The genius Bajrang Dal and Durga Vahini activists might have
realised that the only way to find out what love is would be to impose their
own idea of love on everyone else so that there is only one defition of love in
the world.
Want to know what love actually is? Go out and scream about
your idea of love to other people. If someone disagrees... Another hilarious aspect of this outrage by the VHP members
is that a day before they decided that the best way to educate the youth is by
burning greeting cards, they had on Wednesday issued instructions to their
workers and activists not to harass couples on Valentine's Day.
Bajrang Dal's convenor for UP and Uttarakhand had said that
interfering with couple was useless because the "acts that couples indulge
in" at public places is "similar to nature of animals", reported Indian Express.
This really makes us wonder why the Bajrang Dal workers
began outraging a day later though. Maybe the logic behind it was that they had
only promised not to harass couples on Valentine's Day. After
all, no one said anything about not torturing greeting cards, did
they? That's right. You just got owned by an organisation
which likes to burn greeting cards. This, of course, is not the first time politicians are
sharing their profound views on love with the youth.
On Valentine's Day in 2013, saffron activists had held demonstrations in Andhra
Pradesh and forced young men and women who celebrated Valentine's Day to get
'married'. In 2014, Shiv Sena had actually organised an anti-Valentine's Day
procession without any permit in UP. Ahead of Valentine's Day in 2015, right-wing outfits in
western UP had again warned that couples found celebrating the 'foreign festival' will be
forcibly married to each other.
Spreading the message that nothing teaches people the ideas
of love and tradition like violence, hooliganism and moral policing, these
political leaders have told us that this is what you're supposed to do on
Valentine's Day:
