February has arrived and immediately you start seeing red hearts in shop windows and pop-up ads advertising gifts to buy your Valentine. Some people feel that Valentine’s Day is ‘imported’ from the West but a great many embrace it and celebrate it with enthusiasm. After all, it’s just a day to show your loved ones that you care.
You can run but you can never hide. The fact of the matter is, everybody wants and needs love, whether or not he’s a romantic.
Who knows what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet had got married and lived together? Would their love have remained that powerful and blind? But when we watch a romantic scene in a movie, we are moved by the love on screen, because we have either experienced something like that some time in our lives or wished we could.
Romance has moved people throughout history and continues to do so today. Love letters have always been treasured. Beethoven had a secret lover whom he was passionately in love with but this fact came to light only on the discovery of a love letter after his death. Her name was not on the letter, so she remains a mystery. Napoleon Bonaparte was a prolific letter writer and reportedly wrote hundreds of love letters to his wife Josephine. It is through some of these letters that the world discovered the great emperor’s tender and emotional side.
Have you felt your heart surge with love when you read of a character in a book or watched a movie? Did you want to switch places with Jack and kiss Rose in the Titanic? Perhaps your tummy did a flip every time you watched Paul (Keanu Reeves) in A Walk in the Clouds? Whether your dream lover is Mr Darcy from Pride and Prejudice or Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, you can have fun by participating in the Write Your Love contest on Pothi.com.
Write a letter to your fictional lover and the best two letters stand to win a cash prize of Rs 1000 each. Click here for details. Go on, then, bring on the love!
Anil Menon received his Ph.D. from Syracuse University in Computer Science, specializing in evolutionary computation. He spent about nine years working as a research engineer before shifting to writing fiction. His stories have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies including Albedo One, Apex Digest, Chiaroscuro, Interzone, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, New Genre, Sybil’s Garage and Strange Horizons. His short fiction has been translated into German, French, Chinese and Hebrew. In 2009, he helped organize India’s first three-week, in-residence, spec-fic writing workshop at IIT, Kanpur. His debut novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet(Zubaan Books, India) was shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword Children’s Fiction Award. Currently, he is working on a second novel, and along with Vandana Singh, editing the Speculative Ramayana anthology (Zubaan Books, August 2012). He can be reached at iam@anilmenon.com.
Maitrayee Roychoudhury is an Assistant Lecturer of English at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, New Delhi. She is also a freelance editor which makes crossing Ts and dotting Is an occupational hazard. She likes to meander across the border into creative writing sometimes but loves, most of all, to curl up with a good book at the end of the day. She is also an unabashed romantic who thinks everyone—the rebels, the cynics, the disenchanted, and the ever-hopeful—will find love someday.