Ahead of the only time of the year when the rose trumps the lotus in India, also known as Valentine’s Day, police forces across India’s metropolises are beefing up security arrangements at public parks. This is being done to preserve Indian culture, which necessitates that touching in public cannot be accepted as long as it is consensual. An unfortunate side effect of this will be on those who are accustomed to seeing whatever they love touching go up in smoke.
Meanwhile, financial apps such as At Least Pay the Interest, Mortgaged Morals and Your Only Salary have rolled out special short-term loans as part of Valentine’s week, which means that couples no longer need to call their love a situationship in a bid to wriggle out of buying Valentine’s gifts. The sole verification required for availing these loans is the absence of a Bumble or a Hinge profile. Those on Tinder are exempted since you cannot cheat on your partner with bots.
Elsewhere, Instagram has launched a special V-Day feature for couples who have tagged each other in at least 100 photos over the past year. Thanks to Instagram’s ‘Gramentine Badge’, such couples can now delete all their pictures together with a single click once they break up.
Wondering what else happened while you considered if the person sharing their Netflix password with you is your true Valentine? Here’s presenting the top stories from the week that should have been.
February 6
The Adani Group has agreed to be interviewed by BBC on the condition that its journalists coming to India purchase a fixed amount of Adani shares first
- Following its resurgence in India, BBC is sending a team of 10 journalists to the country for a special documentary to find out whether “the unstoppable rise of Pathaan at the box office or the unstoppable collapse of Gautam Adani’s companies in the stock market better defines the India of today”.
- Private schools in Delhi have asked students in grades nine and above to watch Netflix’s teen drama, Class, to complete their modules on caste awareness and sex education.
February 7
Liz Truss now realises that “British capitalism is not designed to deal with a few mood swings”
- In her first interview since being outlasted by a lettuce, former Prime Minister of the UK, Liz Truss, laments that “my failure in office was a classic case of unrequited love. Despite giving them my all, including the career of my then chancellor, the free markets never loved me back”.
- A historic wave of protests against increasing the pension eligibility age in France has been quelled after President Emmanuel Macron promised the protesters a daily supply of four glasses of wine.
February 8
Players who have successfully completed ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ will automatically earn a blue tick on Twitter
- Hogwarts Legacy, the first full-length immersive computer game to be set in the iconic castle of the Harry Potter franchise, receives rave reviews for its ingenious plot that makes players toil to collect clues from the remotest corners of Hogwarts, all of which come together in the story’s climax to prove once and for all that J.K. Rowling is transphobic.
- Out of consideration for ChatGPT’s intellectual and emotional bandwidth, Google has come up with its own AI smartbot called Bard (no offence to engineers), which has the unique ability to answer a user’s query even before it has been asked, based on one’s Google Search history.
February 9
Fans of Harry Styles in Republican states think that this year’s Grammy Awards prove that Styles can no longer be seen as a beneficiary of white privilege
- The National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences (NARAS), responsible for organising the Grammy Awards, has apologised to Harry Styles for handing him just the two awards this year, as the NARAS criteria could not be updated in time to include “working class” and “queerbaiting” .
- Two days after being accused of a series of financial breaches, independent investigators in England have cleared Manchester City of all charges, since “the club’s finances are even more intricate than Pep Guardiola’s formations and cannot be understood by English minds”.
February 10
Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra’s most likely honeymoon destination is going to be a Dharma Productions set
- With wedding pictures of Kiara Advani and Sidharth Malhotra, titled “Ab humari permanent booking permanent ho gayi hai”, winning over the internet, Ananya Panday asks Karan Johar to cast her in a romantic blockbuster that will produce her wedding caption in a few years’ time.
- Servers of digital libraries accessible from India crash for four consecutive days after visitors to the International Kolkata Book Fair return with an overflowing shopping list of free PDFs.