This Valentine's Day, let us not be stingy with love

Natasha Badhwar

WE had picked up our daughter after her Class 10 exam and our car was crawling through the city traffic when my husband began to read the poster at the back of the bus ahead of us.

“Matri Pitri Poojan Diwas,” he read slowly, trying to make sense of what he was reading.

“Whaaaa?” responded our 16-year-old.

When we figured it out, we all laughed. First heartily and then a bit awkwardly. In front of us was one of the many posters that have sprung up all over Delhi to distract young Indians from the romantic connotation of Valentine’s Day on February 14 and to inspire them to dedicate the day towards worshipping their parents. On another poster, we saw images of the Lord Shiva and Parvati, along with young Ganesha. The caption read: Lord Ganesha also celebrated the day as Parents’ Worship Day.

“What a sweetheart Ganesha seems to be,” I thought to myself. I don’t want to mock the idea of being extra-reverential towards our parents on any particular day of the year. Rituals and special days are fun. They are a good excuse to pause and appreciate each other with words and acts that make them feel seen. God knows we can all use an extra dose of gentleness from our loved ones.

What makes this messaging seem less than well-intentioned is that it tries to eulogise one kind of love and diminish other expressions of it. This makes no sense, as the self-proclaimed guardians of culture who come up with ideas like mother-father worship day probably know all too well. The world was not invented yesterday and the rest of us were not born today morning.

As Valentine’s Day approaches this year, I want to honour the multiple ways in which we experience love. The unspoken, unacknowledged gestures of care; the relationships we don’t count when we try to dishonour love and beat it down into narrow, shallow definitions. Or worse, when the attempt is quite blatantly to criminalise love.

Love is generosity. It is gratitude. Gentleness.

You know it is love when it makes you feel vulnerable. When it inspires you to lower the drawbridge and offer access to your inner, truer self.

Love forces us out of our comfort zone. It demands change. It judges us and makes us critique our own self. We reach this difficult stage in romantic love, we crash into it as parents and our best friendships make us confront ourselves as a reward for trusting each other with candidness.

Love means bringing out the best of each other. It also means having to endure the worst of each other. Siblings know this from the beginning. Couples discover it, often to their shock and horror. In love, there is a space for confrontation. Walk into it with humility and confidence. Love is power. It holds influence.

Love means learning again and again that we are flawed by design. It teaches us to live with disagreements. Love is patience. It means not calling him and asking if he is upset with me. Because he is busy and I am busy and the love is there. Let it be.

Love means taking the pain of the other and feeling it in one’s own body. Love is truly a waste of time.

Love is knowing when to let go of the beloved because we cannot always nurture our need for intimacies. We keep the memories safe, we let time and distance heal the rest.

Love is teachers reaching out to speak to our essential self, beyond the subject they teach. Doctors and healers validating our pain and bearing witness even if they cannot do much to mitigate it. Writers and artists sharing their stories of struggle, loss and triumph, despite their inhibitions.

Love is friends returning to seek forgiveness. Messaging each other to let the other know we think of them much more than we manage to connect. They are not alone. They are loved. Love means validating each other’s remnants of childhood trauma.

I am happy to report that love is also fun and games. It isn’t just about changing lives and propping each other up. It is in everyday acts, in the small fragments of time when we are doing nothing of consequence.

In our family, I watch my adolescent children learn to parent each other. They bully and they protect. They negotiate with us on each other’s behalf. They let the parents know that we can step back. Exhausted from years of being vigilant to their needs, this is the act of love we learn to appreciate.

We don’t need to be stingy with love. We can worship our parents and be devoted to our secret crushes at the same time. We can love animals, trees and the sky and be besotted with the humans in our life. We can love friends and be loving towards strangers. None of these come with exclusivity clauses. None of these cancel the other out. Valentine’s Day mubarak to all of you.

— The writer is a filmmaker & author.

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