Posted on 02/14/2006 5:26:56 AM PST by Alex Marko
NEW DELHI, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Hardline Hindu groups and radical Muslims burned Valentine's Day greeting cards on Tuesday and held protests across India against celebrating the festival of love, saying it was a Western import that spread immorality.
Saint Valentine's Day has become increasingly popular in India in recent years, a trend led by retailers who do healthy business selling heart-shaped balloons and fluffy teddy bears.
But the growing popularity of the day in officially secular, but mainly Hindu India has also sparked protests which have sometimes turned violent.
On Tuesday, protests were held in the capital New Delhi, some towns in the country's south and the only Muslim state of Jammu and Kashmir, where an Islamic insurgency has raged since 1989.
About two dozen women separatists, veiled in black from head to toe, rummaged shops and burnt Valentine's Day cards in Srinagar, Kashmir's summer capital, witnesses said.
"Valentine's Day spreads immorality among the youth," Asiya Andrabi of the Dukhtaran-e-Milat (Daughters of the Muslim Faith), a group of women separatists, said in a statement.
"We appeal to our children to stay away from this western culture."
In Bangalore, India's technology capital, as well as Hubli town, both located in the southern state of Karnataka, groups of Hindu nationalists burnt a big heart-shaped card.
About 50 Hindu activists wearing holy saffron-coloured scarves held a noisy protest in a popular market near the Delhi University campus, a Reuters photographer said.
They burnt greeting cards which they were carrying and shouted "Down with Valentine's Day". (Additional reporting by Sheikh Mushtaq in SRINAGAR)
Much like the cartoon protests, it is a very tiny minority, apparently insecure, that gets upset.
Okay, the Mohammedans I get, but what's up with the usually syncretistic Hindus, whose own religious tradition includes the Kama Sutra, objecting to Valentine's Day?
The Shiv Sena is not representative of most Hindus. They are a tiny (and politically lost) faction within the Hindu political parties itself. They are tiny, but noisy.
They have eroded their own vote-base rapidly in the recent few years. The next elections will prove them fatal.
This'll clear your query:
PHOTOS: Love wins over protests in India
The Times of India ^ | Tuesday, February 14, 2006 06:52:35 pm IANS | Reuters
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1578291/posts
I'm highly offended by their disrespect for our traditions. They should be more tolerant. We should bomb the hell out of this country.""
IMO, the biggest bomb we could use against India and others who are being so stupid is to cancel all the jobs we have exported over there and close the offices and plants we have provided for their economy.
I'm always amused by this, because as holidays go, Valentine's Day has got to be about the most inoffensive one on the block. Granted, it's super commercial, but how can people get enraged about candy hearts and fluffy stuffed animals?""
The real test will be seeing how they handle St Patrick's Day. Let's see if they riot against the Irish.....
I'm always amused by this, because as holidays go, Valentine's Day has got to be about the most inoffensive one on the block. Granted, it's super commercial, but how can people get enraged about candy hearts and fluffy stuffed animals?""
The real test will be seeing how they handle St Patrick's Day. Let's see if they riot against the Irish.....
Be my anti-Valentine
By Olivia Barker, USA TODAY Mon Feb 13, 7:16 AM ET
This Valentine's Day, retailers are thumbing their noses at hearts and redirecting arrows at Cupid himself.
Traditionally sweet symbols and sayings are getting tweaked in the card and gift aisles, resulting in teddy bears that are more wry than warm and fuzzy and candies that are more sarcastic than saccharine.
It's a reflection of the anti-Valentine sentiment that's been streaking through the holiday for the past few years, with singletons asserting their solidarity in Feb. 14 parties that champion camaraderie over coupling.
After all, divorces, prenuptial agreements and annulments historically spike around Valentine's Day - 36%, 28% and 21% respectively in 2005, according to LegalMatch.com - so why not archly acknowledge the holiday's less-romantic side with a T-shirt that proclaims "Cupid can't aim"?
"People are tired of the pressure, of making it so commercial," says Ana Weber, a dating and relationship coach based in Newport Beach, Calif. (In 2005, Unity Marketing found that Valentine's is the third-biggest gift-giving holiday, behind Christmas and Mother's Day; celebrators spend $126 on average.) "Romance and passion and love should be something more spontaneous. This is not a business deal."
AG Interactive, the online arm of American Greetings, says more customers are asking for skewed (and skewering) Valentines. The company's collection numbers nearly a dozen. AG Interactive's Sally Babcock says she gave her sister a paper card this year featuring perfume bottles and the message "Valentine's Day stinks," and she "loved it." At shopping comparison site Shopping.com, lonely hearts can trawl for down-with-love loot. Valentine's Day "traditionally felt really exclusionary if you didn't have someone in your life," says Shannon Clouston, the site's chief shopper. Now, "everyone's owning a piece of it."
Fascinating - thanks. Certainly not the India I left 20 years ago.
A lot more to travel still.
<< I dunno of any conspiracy theorists, narcissists, paranoiacs, nutters or eccentrics on FR and I am too polite for name-calling. BTW "conspiracy" has an 'a' between 'r' and 'c'. >>
When one fishes for clever little Gunga Dins, Dear G-K, one tends to vary one's baits a bit.
On the other hand, as evidence of your politness has thus far escaped my attentions, I will, because my good manners insist upon it, take your word for it!
What's the weathner like there, today? I am in America and am homesick for Asia and a good curry lunch and dinner or two. And fresh chapati and fish curry and chai for breakfast sure kicks the heck outta corn flakes, eggs, English muffin and coffee!
Hugs - B A
Reminds me of a poem by Ramdhari Singh Dinkar (from when I was in school) - kalme karo, dhyan se karo. In English, transplant, but transplant with care.
The celebration of Anything with a heart is like an insult and slanderous slap in the face and disrespectful to heartless Islamites.
"Tiny Minority." Tiny as compared to what? The grains of sand on earths beaches?
Tiny as compared to the total. If you have ten old ladies destroying cards out of a billion Muslims, that's approaching infinitesimal.
If you've got a thousand shouting Death to Whoever The Media Will Cover and another ten thousand hanging around watching the action, that's still tiny.
The insane Islamites are rioting all over planet earth. Ofended by anything and everyone and demanding that we all comply with their retarded view of reality, or else.
We either draw a line in the sand where our tolerence of their intolorable demands stop and fight them with everymeans available to us and at whatever sacrifice to us or else surrender, submit and adjust to a world controlled by Islamitic trolls from hell.
And, yes. They initiated the action and set the ground rules for the conflict saying anything goes. It's their game, so anything goes in dealing with the threat they present.
I'm sure showing respect, romance and love toward women is highly offensive to cultures where women are things you participate in human rights abuses against.
Those folks don't have a religion, they have a cult, look at the fruits of their religion and culture and you will know what they are.
Wise man, your poet.
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