The Gift of the Valentine

  That’s Amore, I tell you that’s amore, when the sky seems more blue and even the cawing of Mr Black is melodious. Love’s in the air, they say and Valentine’s is just around the corner. For the young in Kolkata, the season of love starts from Saraswati puja and peaks on the 14^th Feb. Now don’t tell me that the Goddess of Learning is a serious faced bore, who doesn’t help you to ‘learn’ about love!!  The first glimpses in the Saraswati pandal, or at the puja in that college or in your friend’s place… Its true you can’t call this the World Wide Web of Saraswati, but definitely it’s the Local Area Network!!

. But in the celestial sphere, the departments of Saraswati and Valentine are separate (though there is some inter-departmental muddling in this strange East Indian city). Valentine is not the god of love, the way Cupid or Venus is, or even our Kamdev and Madan. He is the patron saint of Love and there are many theories about the origin of Valentine’s Day. Some say that Saint Valentine was a priest in ancient Rome who defied Emperor Claudius’s order that soldiers could not marry. He performed secret wedding rituals for lovers, or even saved prisoners from the harsh tortures of the regime. According to another theory, Valentine’s festival was a Church attempt to Christianize the pagan fertility festival of Lupercalia.

Whatever may have been the origins of the festival, my greatest regret remains, that when the Valentine culture really caught on in India, raging like wild fire, we were already out of college (I graduated in the prehistoric year of 1989). During those days, Valentine’s was still in its infancy in this country. Newspapers and magazines used to carry initiatory articles on the cult. I happened to read in some supplement, an interview of a celebrity messiah who said that Valentine’s Day was not only for a lover or boyfriend, but anybody you loved deeply, a parent, a sibling, even a pet. I had jumped up at the suggestion because I, and many other hapless, uncharismatic individuals like me, did not have a confirmed ‘Valentine’. Human Valentine was mostly a possibility, a potential energy, nothing kinetic. J So my pet rabbit was my Valentine one year, and next year it was my grandma ( now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to say my grandma was not human) . And I was a bit sad, that neither my rabbit Naadu nor grandma had the common sense to gift me something in return!! What I should have celebrated was the anti Valentine’s Day!!

But in those ancient times, when Valentine’s itself was new, people hadn’t yet heard of the anti Valentine’s! No, it is not the moral brigade, burning Archie’s showrooms, but something more interesting. Anti Valentine’s is a celebration of the single status. Some people feel that the equation of love relationship with happiness is a myth. But the majority feel otherwise and they senselessly take the catastrophic decision to marry on the Day of Love. Tragically, Valentine’s Day becomes their Dooms day!! Of course there are survivors in any catastrophe, and those who still love each other, inspite of marrying on Valentine’s Day, are the ones that got saved in Noah’s Ark.

 Valentine’s Day is not only about love, but the best way to express it. With the great advances in printing technology, the greetings cards have entered the arena, and it was a big help in those times when direct expression of feelings was a taboo. Even now, printed cards are the only help for the tongue tied! According to the Greeting Cards Association, about one billion Valentine cards are sent each year, making Valentine's Day the second largest card-sending occasion, next only to Christmas. And we must not forget that it was Archie’s, a greetings card brand, that popularized and commercialized the whole Valentine concept in the non Christian, non European world. And now there are women’s magazines, or lifestyle magazines, that tell us, rather teach us how to impress a loved one. They guide each and every step in our personal lives. These magazines have graduated from teaching cookery, to teaching their readers how to impress a husband, how to adjust with a bossy mom in law, how to cope in a live in relationship, how to accept if your child is discovered gay, how to… well…ahemm!! more serious stuff!!! Sorry…see how I digress! Anyway, so as I was saying about the Valentine culture…and these women’s magazines too helped us to learn to love in the Valentine’s way.

Apart from printed cards, the gifts and jewellery brands too are making lucrative business, not to forget the chocolates. The costs of the Valentine gifts, given and received, decide many things in the lives of young people. It becomes not only a mark of status, but also a quantification of their love. So in this age of ‘gifted’ love, I can’t help remembering the ageless short story, ‘The Gift of the Magi’…it goes like this… Della and Jim are a married couple who love each other very much. But they are poor. On Christmas, they want to give each other a very special gift. Della decided to give Jim a costly chain for his precious watch, so she cut off and sold her lovely long hair. Jim wanted to give her a comb for her long cascading hair and he sold his precious watch to buy the comb. The discovery led to both joy and dismay. It was the beauty of sacrifice that made their love so poignant, and they sacrificed their most cherished and precious possessions for each other. Though it is a story about Christmas gifts but their love makes it applicable for Valentine too.

Lastly, I salute those great lovers and couples who hardly got the opportunity to express their loves, or those, for whom such celebratory expressions were mere superficialities; The couples who have sacrificed their lives and happiness for the sake of the beloved, cared, nurtured and nursed their loves in times of sickness and need; Those loves that were and still are silent and deep, moving beyond the rose and the red heart!! J

© Nandini Basu 2011

Goddess Saraswati

She comes with the music of the Veena, mounted on the gracious white swan that rings her white bells of divinity. She is Saraswati, the deity of  knowledge, wisdom, speech, intelligence, consciousness, arts and music. Though she is traditionally considered to be the (younger?) daughter of Goddess Durga, the Matsyapuran tells a different story. There she is the daughter and wife of Brahma, who had created her out of his own self but later became her consort.  But the moral unease of such an interpretation has been obliterated by the more domestic image of Saraswati as one among four siblings, visiting her maternal home every year!

 In the Rig Veda she was originally a river goddess, river Saraswati being one of the main rivers in ancient Vedic culture (apart from the Indus.) River Saraswati was supposed to have 3 main triburtaries, the Sutlej, Drishadvati and old Yamuna. The deity’s association with water not only proves the importance of rivers in ancient cultures but a more primordial connection with precosmic primal water that nourished the first life in the universe. The water may also be the symbol of life in the womb, nurtured by the embryonic fluid. It can also represent any form of fluidity, that of speech, knowledge and consciousness. The flowing river is also the metaphor of a journey or transformation that evolves our consciousness. Saras…flowing, watery….and water is the mainstay of life.

Pallas Athena

The name Saraswati also has Middle Eastern associations. Etymologically, it echoes the river Haraikhati mentioned in the Persian Zendavesta. But it is debatable whether the Persian Aryans settled here and brought with them the name and memory of the river Haraikhati , or whether ancient Vedic people migrated to Iran later and called the river there with the name that echoed Saraswati! In the Avesta she is the deity of water known as Aredvi Sura Anahita and also the goddess of wisdom. She reverberates in many corners of the ancient world. The ancient Greeks had Pallas Athena as the deity of knowledge and wisdom (Athena was also associated with warfare). Just as Brahma had created Saraswati from his own self, for which she is regarded as his daughter, Athena too is supposed to have originated from the forehead of Zeus, the king of gods. This Greek symbolism has been interpreted as the creative urge that gives rise to intellectual creation and thus Zeus underwent a terrible headache at her birth. In Egypt, the deity of knowledge, wisdom, writing and language was the ibis headed god Thoth or Tehuti, the source of all secular and divine knowledge. Thoth was also the presiding deity of magic which was important in most of the ancient cultures. He was sometimes identified as Hermes Trismegistus in Greco Egyptian occult literature.

Tehuti or Thoth

With the connection of Tehuti and Hermes, we come to another aspect of Saraswati as the goddess of speech or Vac. In the occult text of ‘Corpus Hermeticum’  the Logos (word) is supposed to be the ultimate creative principle of Life and Consciousness. It was a doctrine of salvation. The same idea is found in the Gospel of John, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Saraswati too symbolizes the creative power of sound, the personification of the Word.

Thus the magical aspect of the First Word as sacral speech or primal logos gets intertwined with precosmic primal water. Water nurtures life, Word gives it form and the ordered cosmos is created. Saraswati combines all these archetypal images and more. She is the Primordial that gives birth to reason and consciousness. After all the western psychological associations of the feminine with unreason and irrationality, its refreshing to discover that intelligence, reason and consciousness have feminine roots…but now if you choose to concentrate more on the father oriented, asexual birth of Saraswati, you are after a wild goose chase and we will be back to the old riddle of the chick and the egg!! J

© Nandini Basu 2011

Fairytales

My lonely walks

across the meadow

of your heart…

I lost my way in the fog

of your memory.

I was invisible as the wind

As shadowy as your own shadow….

I stared at the chameleon in you

I was thrilled like a child….

For at last I saw the unicorn

or the dragon

out of a fairytale book.

Your scales were fiery

Touched the chimney in my kitchen

The heat of my oven cooled

The final shape,

settled into the mould

of the evening.

I don’t have to make

moulds anymore

because the sun stares

at my face all night long.

© Nandini Basu 2011