"People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"
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As a Valentine's Day card smoldered, more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena gathered in central New Delhi chanted "Death to Valentine's Day" and "People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"
Valentine's Day has in the past two decades made strong inroads in India as the country has slowly opened itself up to the outside world — its economic boom bringing in not just foreign investment, but also aspects of Western culture virtually unknown here a quarter-century ago.
Across the country, stores stocked heart-shaped balloons and chocolates, restaurants offered Valentine's Day specials and young lovers found refuge from prying eyes in the parks.
It's a state of affairs that enrages Hindu and Muslim hard-liners, who on Wednesday vented just as they do every Valentine's Day — burning cards, holding rallies and even threatening to beat couples caught canoodling in public, a strict no-no for those who claim to defend traditional Indian values.
"This is a conspiracy to misguide the young people of our country," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, chief of the Shiv Sena's north India branch.
In his hand the card, with its image of a Victorian couple pictured in a tepid peck under a parasol, went up in flames.
"We have come to know that in America, even unmarried girls as young as 11 or 12 years have become mothers ... and every second man there is divorced," Goel told reporters after reducing several greeting cards to a small pile of ash. "This is their culture— it cannot be accepted here."
To us Americans, this seems so extreme. Yet this is a very common feeling in many parts of the world, because they feel the West, particularly America, is corrupting their youth. Here in Thailand there are no riots, but the older generation views Valentine's Day as a day of lust and sex brought in from America, to add to all the other massive cultural changes in their world from the Western media influence. They see it as a very unwelcome change, and many times what they see here in tourist areas just adds to their conviction that westerners are sex-crazed animals that lack dignity and self-control.
When I first started hearing the stories of how people felt about Americans, I was shocked and dismayed how many other nationalities viewed America as such a degenerate culture. Yet thinking about all the movies coming out of the U.S. makes one begin to understand how these grandmas and grandpas must feel, afraid as their children and grandchildren embrace this foreign obsession with being sexy, scoffing tradition and the sensibilites of the older generations.
It certainly makes me ponder my own culture.
As a Valentine's Day card smoldered, more than 100 members of the Hindu extremist group Shiv Sena gathered in central New Delhi chanted "Death to Valentine's Day" and "People who celebrate Valentine's Day should be pelted with shoes!"
Valentine's Day has in the past two decades made strong inroads in India as the country has slowly opened itself up to the outside world — its economic boom bringing in not just foreign investment, but also aspects of Western culture virtually unknown here a quarter-century ago.
Across the country, stores stocked heart-shaped balloons and chocolates, restaurants offered Valentine's Day specials and young lovers found refuge from prying eyes in the parks.
It's a state of affairs that enrages Hindu and Muslim hard-liners, who on Wednesday vented just as they do every Valentine's Day — burning cards, holding rallies and even threatening to beat couples caught canoodling in public, a strict no-no for those who claim to defend traditional Indian values.
"This is a conspiracy to misguide the young people of our country," said Jai Bhagwan Goel, chief of the Shiv Sena's north India branch.
In his hand the card, with its image of a Victorian couple pictured in a tepid peck under a parasol, went up in flames.
"We have come to know that in America, even unmarried girls as young as 11 or 12 years have become mothers ... and every second man there is divorced," Goel told reporters after reducing several greeting cards to a small pile of ash. "This is their culture— it cannot be accepted here."
To us Americans, this seems so extreme. Yet this is a very common feeling in many parts of the world, because they feel the West, particularly America, is corrupting their youth. Here in Thailand there are no riots, but the older generation views Valentine's Day as a day of lust and sex brought in from America, to add to all the other massive cultural changes in their world from the Western media influence. They see it as a very unwelcome change, and many times what they see here in tourist areas just adds to their conviction that westerners are sex-crazed animals that lack dignity and self-control.
When I first started hearing the stories of how people felt about Americans, I was shocked and dismayed how many other nationalities viewed America as such a degenerate culture. Yet thinking about all the movies coming out of the U.S. makes one begin to understand how these grandmas and grandpas must feel, afraid as their children and grandchildren embrace this foreign obsession with being sexy, scoffing tradition and the sensibilites of the older generations.
It certainly makes me ponder my own culture.
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