Love is made for gossip.
Who's seeing who?
Who dumped who?
Who's two timing who?
Who's on a man hunt?
Bitching about creepy girl/boyfriends is fun. Romance is the juiciest part of all conversations, and try as hard as we do to be as 'intellectual' as possible, we always seem to know the latest about the love lives of J-Lo, David Beckham or Aishwarya Rai.
If you are a loser in love, chill, you don't have to be in love to enjoy love. There are enough soppy friends with hot dates, plenty of celebrities and shelves and shelves of romance novels to keep one abreast.
Salman & Salman with Padma & Katrina.
Liz Hurley with Arun Nayar
Mills & Boon, picture romance books and classic love stories -- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind.
You know the feeling so well that you could write a whole paper on it.
All of us have been in love. Sometimes we are lucky, other times, not quite. But it's not as if we haven't tried. We have the freedom to go out, meet girls/boys and be in love.
Not once but several times over.
We are liberated enough. Like the MTV slogan in the early 90s -- free your minds -- our minds are 'free'. We can speak our minds -- to parents, to lovers -- and tell them both that they suck when we want to.
It was something our mothers could never dream of. They lived in a time when they listened to Binaca Geet Mala on the radio once a week on the sly. They were made to cook every day so that they could make delicious meals for the men they married. They were taught that virginity was a gift for their husbands.
Nobody told us all this. Not our mothers. Not our teachers. If someone did take a chance, we sure had an army of self manicured nails to scratch their eyes out.
To the horror of many mothers, our generation is into blind dates. It is getting 'flirty at 7.30' on FM and falling in and out of love on MSN.
We work hard, party hard and boldly talk about boyfriends or girlfriends of the past with the boyfriends/girlfriends of the present.
We can tell our men to shut up. We can get drunk and see that they don't so that they can drive us home after a blast late night.
We can go for overnight trips and dance the whole night away.
There are many who think we are a reckless tribe. That life for us is only fun and games. That we are, horror of horrors, too Westernised. That we are a V-Day celebrating bunch who care a **** about this country, are clueless about its past and have no stake in its future.
That we are 'too fast' and too far removed from the real India.
That India which supposedly is shining brighter then ever before.
In many ways what we are is because India is shining in certain ways. We have grown up with this India. Just as India has grown with us.
We benefited from the very education system that we often decry, and owe every one of our successes to the schools and colleges in villages, towns and cities that tutored us. We sat for competitive exams, appeared for group discussions, gave job interviews, found jobs and worked very hard to live the 'reckless' lives that we do.
I believe the reason India is doing well is partly because of us. We celebrate V-Day, buy branded stuff, go to the pub on Friday nights but we also have ideas, creativity and the hard-nosed drive to get ahead.
We are a pool of resources and contribute to changing India.
Reckless? Not quite. Those who frown on us should in fact be proud of us.
Because if India is really shining, it is also because of us.
So just chill and have a rocking Valentine's Day!