Valentines Day. Meh, writes Aditi Mittal

Aaaah. Hell. It's Valentine's Day again. Every year in the barrage of 'Why I love Valentine's Day' article will come the unnecessarily revolutionary 'Why I hate Valentine's Day'. People with dates will stress over outfits and people without dates will make fun of those stressing. Single people will declare that they are celebrating their singledom, go out, get wasted and then cry quietly about feeling lonely. People in relationships will be counting down another dinner over more melting wax with tiny portions and big price tags. Shops and stores will be awash with pink and white and purple like we're living in a sanitary napkin commercial.

'I will always love you' and (for some awkward reason) 'It must have been love' will be saxophon-ed into your ears all day long. Some political party will try to beat up people holding hands or drinking coffee in public who will run away not because they're scared but because they just can't deal with any more cliches. So this Valentine's Day- I urge you to join me in a collective shrug, a 'Meh, what's the point?'

Let's agree that the 90s idea of meeting someone at a deafeningly loud club to fall in love is thankfully less common. How much can you get to know a person if 90% of your conversation is basically saying, 'WHAT, I CAN'T HEAR YOU,' over and over to each other?

Sometimes falling in love is not worth the distance. And here the distance I'm implying is not the 16-hour flight around the world, it's the 3-hour traffic riddled commute between meeting points everyday that makes young couples cut short their courtships and just get married so that they can live together already. There's not much romance left in a person, after one-and-a-half hour train ride and a 40-minute bus ride in peak hour Mumbai traffic. 'Falling in love', as Aerosmith once wailed is 'hard on the knees'.

There's Tinder, the online app equivalent of the Pammi Aunty of yesteryears, who would bring photos to you of all the boys and girls in the neighbourhood and from various networks and make you flip through them. Like a Zomato for lonely people. Here you are expected to judge someone on the basis of six photographs and a 200-character description. Unless you're witty or pretty - you might as well uninstall Tinder and use that space on your phone for the newest update of Temple Run/Candy Crush. Falling in love is hard on phone memories.

On the serious ones - like shaadi.com and (insert community name), matrimony.com they ask you for things like your body type (there is literally no option for 'khaate peete ghar ki') and your salary (where there is no option for 'is this for a partner or for a CA?') You're expected to be modern, yet traditional, independent yet dependant, strong yet sensitive, educated yet uneducated and from deep down just be really shallow. The only way one could qualify for all is if you have multiple personality disorder. If that's not enough the iitiimshaadi.com portal gives hope to people who have been specifically to IIT's followed by IIM's. The Captcha to sign up for that website is apparently a sample three-hour CAT exam. Falling in love is now hard on college fees.

So as we approach the wintery weekend of Feb 14, I urge you all to enthusiastically and actively, not give a hoot about Valentine's Day. I realise the irony of writing an entire entire column asking you not to care. But why would you ponder that- when it's so much easier to join me in that collective shrug and a 'Meh. What's the point?'