On Saturday, while rummaging through some papers, I discover one in which my 10-year-old daughter and her friends have tried to ascertain the status of their relationships with boys through the time-honoured methodology of FLAMES. (As anyone who has gone to school in the last 30 or so years knows, by eliminating the common letters between the two names and counting the remaining down until only one letter is left, it can be ascertained whether the duo is Friends, Lovers, Admirers, Marriage-bound, Enemies or Siblings). Fittingly, my discovery comes exactly a week before Valentine’s Day. Ever so discreetly, I try to ferret out some information about the status of romance in Std IV, but all I can gather is that while boys are still mostly deplorable, some of them have begun to manifest themselves as crushes.
Although my opinion in this matter is not sought, I am eager to play it cool, to tell her that crushes are not just normal, they are to be celebrated. To be sure, when I was growing up, we didn’t have crushes at 10. But at 13 or 14, when you felt the first stirrings of something identifiable but unwelcome, the first instinct was to feel shame. There would be no talk of personal crushes at home. There would be no talk of love at home. When someone in the neighbourhood was spotted “chatting” with a boy, every parent on the lane made it their duty to not just warn their offspring against love, but also give a dressing down to the girl in question. Love, romantic love, was the scourge of our times, and it was a collective parental responsibility to not allow teenage kids “any damages or distractions” and instead help them focus solely on their inherited ambition of becoming an engineer or a doctor, and absolutely nothing else.
When I left the culturally stifling environment of the township I grew up in and went to college in Chennai, I realised the taboo against love wasn’t just a small-town fixation. My generation, largely, has been raised to have no desire for anything other than a selfish pursuit of stable livelihood. Our parents, born in the ’40s and early ’50s, grew up hearing stories of family and community members standing up to the cause of the freedom struggle. This trickled down, and for a large chunk of the generation before mine, passion was directed into the desire for nation building. When I now hear my parents and their friends talk, the motif of their romance, I notice, is unrequited love. After a few drinks are downed, often, a few names crop up and in a matter of minutes, poor renditions of Mohammed Rafi ands Mukesh fill the room. Perhaps, they wanted us to escape the pain. Perhaps, because the nation didn’t really build well, they had concluded that no matter what the question is, love is not the answer. Irrespective of their motivations and reasons, fact remains, most 40-55-year-olds in the country today have been raised to believe that unbridled passion is not a worthy ambition, that surrendering to it is foolishness.
We are the ones who make jokes about Valentine’s Day, not just because it signifies gaudy consumption of all things red, but because we have been raised to believe there is nothing to celebrate about love. Love makes us squeamish. By the time our kids grow up and start chasing their dreams, we would have effectively completed our circle of driven, yet joyless pursuits of possession that only the self-centred can achieve. Even now, when we meet, we talk about ourselves — the cars that we plan to buy, the holiday destinations that we plan to “do”, the housing prices that have dropped, the mortgage payments that have stretched. The banality of our achievements is only matched by the triteness of our aspirations. We didn’t set out to take our chances and change anything. Instead, we made sure we weren’t being cheated out of anything. We paid to have our risks assessed and bought insurance policies to cover us against the possible and the improbable. If we are stable and secure, it is because we have chosen that against the option of exposing ourselves to any kind of vulnerability — emotional or material.
I am acutely aware of this and yet it is a task to go against conditioning. When my daughter and her friends tell me their ambitions — rock star, footballer, actress, Masterchef winner, I have to bite my tongue so as not to tell them these are fickle options, that making a Plan B wouldn’t be a bad idea. “Just in case,” I want to say, but I manage to hold back. Come Valentine’s Day 2017, maybe my then 11-year-old would have told me a little more about her crushes. And I hope I have the courage to tell her that love is worth plunging into. That passion is priceless. And that making oneself vulnerable is the only guarantee to living a life that is truly full.
Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law; @veenavenugopal