"Valentine" – Its all about love baby!

We are now used to almost every day of the year being remembered as the international day of this or that, and on top of national festivals, commemorations and religious ones to boot, each day become a diary full of events that mark significant chapters of humanity, and the human race.

So it is only fair that February 14^th be reserved for love, and whilst florists enjoy the best day of the year for their business, with flower fields all across the globe, from Holland, Kenya or Columbia and for that matter even Sri Lanka growing their crops to have flowers to be delivered on this date, commercialization has taken over.

It was coincidental that I just received an email with the National Geographical Photos of the year today, and most of the photos depicted the animal kingdom in positions of affection, which I thought very apt as we all wish for and imbibe love as the ultimate satisfaction/fulfillment and the missing link in life.

It is therefore worthy of remembering a love story of our times, a poignant if rather sad one; namely that of the current Burmese Pro-Democracy leader, Aung San Suu Kyi who met and married an Englishman Michael Aris in the 1970s whilst she was studying at Oxford. I believe he proposed to her in the snow capped mountains of Bhutan, where he was living as a tutor to the Royal Family of Bhutan. The photograph above says it all.

They made a deal that if ever her country needed her she would go. So in 1988 when she left them in the UK and went to be at her ailing mothers beside in Rangoon, she found herself at the head of a resistance movement and never returned, later being put under house arrest in 1989.

There were a few visits by her two sons in the intervening period, and while she could leave and return to the UK when she would not be permitted to return, she decided to stay. Her husband died of cancer in 1998 with permission to visit her in Burma refused despite high level intervention on humanitarian grounds.

The love story is depicted in a movie called “The Lady” released in 2011.

It therefore worthy of remembering what live and purpose of our living is all about. We sometimes cannot have everything we want. We must make choices which we must live with and carry on to fulfill a purpose to which we are sent to Earth!