From Valentine's Day to Women's Day, we are increasingly exposed to a lot more marketing and a lot less meaning
It is impossible to get through any newspaper on any day without facts and figures proving India is not a safe place for women
I didn't know how important Valentine's Day was until my last years of college, when posters at every stationery store shoved that message down my throat. This is when stores selling greeting cards still existed, obviously, at a time when we didn't have Amazon and people still visited bookstores. I thought about buying Valentine's Day cards, too, not because I had anyone to give them to, but because we were all made to feel as if it was something that couldn't be avoided.
That fear of missing out has only become worse from that point on. It's hard to forget about Valentine's Day even if one wants to, because everyone from the building association to one's friendly paanwallah has become part of the act. There are contests, special offers, obnoxious pink hearts on walls that couldn't possibly be uglier, and a cloying stickiness that hovers over every couple as they pretend to be more in love for 24 hours than they really are.
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I didn't have a Mothers' Day or Father's Day while growing up. They probably existed, but we weren't informed. The school I went to didn't force us all to make cards that proved how much we loved our parents, so we treated those days like any other. Our parents weren't informed either, so they simply assumed we loved them and managed to carry on without expecting poorly made gifts.
This sounds cynical, and I recognise that, but it's hard not to be when one considers the reality of what occurs when we aren't celebrating Parents' Day, Mothers' Day, Women's Day or Valentine's Day. Every other day in India is proof of how badly we treat women, irrespective of how young or old they are. Not too long ago, reports described a school that required menstruating girls to avoid physical contact with other students and stay out of the kitchen. Students were allegedly interrupted during lessons, publicly asked about whether they were on their period, and forced to take off their underwear in a restroom. Apparently, this form of harassment is routine.
A week before this incident made it to the papers, a group of men reportedly entered a women's college in Delhi and molested several students. They did this without fear, safe in the knowledge that they would get away with it. Those who were caught were granted bail and may never pay the price for what is a crime.
It is impossible to get through any newspaper on any day without being confronted with facts and figures that prove India is not a safe place for women. The Gender Inequality Index, introduced by the United Nations Development Programme, measures gender disparity and places India in the bottom 20 percentile of ranked countries. In 2012, the National Crime Records Bureau reported crimes against women being committed every three minutes. Is this the kind of country that deserves to celebrate Mothers' Day, Women's Day, or Valentine's Day?
There will always be a significant number of people who choose to focus on the positive aspects of these celebrations, pointing out that they are meant to be displays of affection. I refuse to look at them as such, because they smack of hypocrisy and tokenism that allows us to get away without implementing meaningful change. We can celebrate Women's Day with the women closest to us in our personal lives, while wilfully ignoring the million others struggling with dowry, honour killings, acid attacks, domestic violence, and marital rape. It's easy to dismiss this by saying there is absolutely no connection between the two, but I cannot fathom how or why we must celebrate women by taking them out to lunch, instead of focusing on why men in this country are raised to think of women as commodities.
We are at a stage in our country's history where women, students, Dalits, and minorities are routinely shoved aside and dismissed, their voices silenced, their rights stolen by the state. We see instances of these acts of racism, bigotry and misogyny on a daily basis, in private and public, but choose to say nothing because we have accepted this as the norm. We have become people who take the act of rape as normal, which makes us a depraved country.
If describing India as a country that hates women makes me an anti-national, I can live with that title. I refuse to celebrate Women's Day, Mothers' Day, Valentine's Day, or any other occasion though, until we do something about the other 364 days.
When he isn't ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper
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