globalization gone awry

premise. i do have a horrific cold and have spent the best part of the past two days with an airplane blanket draped round my neck, trying my damnest to look like a fashionable hang man.
however. some things bother me (e.g. dubbing). another one is saint valentine's day. perhaps erroneously i thought that being flung to a different part of the world, where this pointless and particularly obnoxious and materialistic holiday should/does not exist or bear any link to the culture, i'd be spared the ignominy of having pink hearts and plastic flowers rubbed in my face. BUT NO. on the airplane i got given a heart-shaped biscuit. ``happy saint valentine's,'' trilled in depressingly chirpy tones (shorn of any shade of irony) a motley assortment of improbable characters (including random leppers that surely have the more pressing task of missing limbs to worry about and fat women with flaps of flesh bursting from their PINK saris). whole news programmes were devoted to flower bouquets. whole pages of newspapers were plastered in love text messages. am telling you. they've taken it to a whole new level, here in india. maybe they spotted the opportunity to make a buck and ran with it. all i know is they've taken the rose-tinted wh smith card and raised you a shock-pink billboard. inside the depressingly impersonal meridien hotel, a pair of identical twins sung love ballads from the 80s. all three restaurants (mexican, italian, chinese - note no indian) served special menus that sounded as daft as they probably tasted. i wouldn't know. clearly they were all booked up. by people deciding to be in love on this day of all days of the year. i went to bed. utterly appalled. it was all too much. for one day. i think kali, the goddess of destruction, shares my sentiment. in fact, am sure a few thousand goats are being slaughtered as i type.