Love in the times of moral police

For the lovelorn, these are painfully uncertain times to live in. Contemporary historians could note that a nation besotted by love, love stories and fables  from deserts and seas to dusty arid plains has at the same time also a tragically soft underbelly. To the thugs who are too chicken to fight in Kashmir and instead target haplesss victims in secure, well protected surroundings of Mangalore and Puttur, Valentine's Day offers yet another opportunity to assault this most basic of Indian premises. Attacking girls in a Mangalore pub is their way of expressing their "Indianness".

The millennium that the anti-love vandals vainly evoke is dead and buried being the age when women were forced to stay confined within their homes, doing their daily chores: the time when the so-called high-born male alone could feast on the goodies of life. But the Hindustan of today represents a myriad races and faiths  and to say that Valentine's Day violates local ethos is as good as disputing India's multicultural character.

Given such a broad compass, then, picking the greatest among the love classics was by no means a small challenge. Laila-Majnu and Nal-Damayanti are love fables. The love saga of MGR and Jayalalitha, both on and off screen, made cinematic history. The love lives of Satyajit Ray and Rabindra Nath Tagore represent little known facets of personalities so towering that the human element is invariably likely to be lost in any empirical assessment.

The fairytale romance of Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi in the hallowed precincts of Cambridge in the 1960s makes for a riveting read. Fair also to say that this was one union that continues to impact Indian politics. Fascinating also is the fiery oratory of young student leader Vayalar Ravi, which caught the fancy of 14-year-old Mercy. Some of the love stories have a real-life edge to them. Couples like Rizwanur and Priyanka Todi continue to set the Hoogly aflame by their mesmerising tale of love, tragedy and shame: a poor Muslim boy in love with the daughter of a millionaire Hindu seth. A story which ended in disaster at the hands of a cunning, well connected and ruthless father, it remains truly a contemporary classic.

Azharuddin and Sangeeta Bijlani met when Azzu had just moved gears: from being a State Bank of India clerk to being one of India's top batsmen. He left wife Naureen to wed the brown-eyed Sangeeta Bijlani, and in no time the love affair was taking its toll on the cricket field.

Or when Infosys boss and founder, NR Narayana Murthy proposed to his wife Sudha back in the 1970s, when they were both employees of Tata's Telco. Then the impending globalisation was no more than a thought. Came the 1990s, and Murthy was among the first to see and capitalise on the information technology boom, leading Infosys in becoming a global bluechip company.

What about Chand Muhammad and Fiza, though? Should they too be included in the list of classical romantics? Was it love or lust? TSI arrived at the conclusion that what promised to be a modern epic tale of requited love � where the boundaries of faith and pelf had apparently been crossed � could well turn out to be a story unlikely to attract the attention of anyone other than a seasoned producer of low grade potboilers. So out went Chand and Fiza.

Would our immoral moral police have attacked the pantheon of great and ordinary love stories that feature in this issue of the magazine? And to think that in the heydays of these eternal romances, official censorship was stronger than exists today. Luckily then, there was no moral police.