Taking a cue from one of my earlier articles…in case you have happened to read my earlier article…this article is on the similar theme, but I have tried to intrude into its deeper issues..
In today’s article we will talk about something that we all know about, some have done it, some want to, some run away from it, some feel its important, some feel its necessary, some have an opinion that it is not required, some feel its just a formality. Marriage, a concept where two people decide to be together and spend the rest of their lives with eachother, but also get legally registered, and I must say this now, because, now-a-days there is also a concept of living-in together that’s getting popular. So its pretty important to distinguish the two. In India, even this marriage is divided in two types; love marriage and arranged marriage, a concept probably found only in India or Indian traditions. I got to know this that people in the west are amazed and curious at the same time when they hear about arranged marriage concept.
In earlier days probably arranged marriages were the only way people got married. I recollect my grandmother telling me, that at their times, many marriages used to happen within family and close relatives. Sometimes the bride and groom spoke with each other only after getting married, and in some weird cases even see each other post marriage. Things evolved with years and freedom was given to the boy and girl to at least meet and talk once with each other, mostly in the presence of 10 other elderly people of the house. Where most of the times guy’s family used to visit girl’s house, where girl’s family is already waiting for them with all the tam-jham. The girl will bring the tea and snacks for all the guests, with 20 eyes on her. With the girl and guy sitting awkwardly, they would be asked by their elders to ask each other whatever questions they had in their mind. It was strange that the elders thought that the moment they said that, the girl and the guy will start talking with each other as long lost friends. Then in some cases, the guy would ask a couple of questions and done, or in some cases, the elders would then ask the girl to take the guy inside and talk with each other in the context of showing him the house. It wasn’t a secret that the guy hadn’t come to buy their house, but it would act as a cue to both that they are being given time to speak with each other for few minutes. Not just that, in most cases, they were to decide to marry each other on the basis of those few spent minutes.
With time things changed, and either the people of that generation felt the need or with evolving world, there was an introduction of a concept called love marriage. Where girl and guy met, knew each other through office, college or common friends. They interacted with each other, had feelings for each other, fell in love with each other. Then the process of introducing your partner at your house would follow. Some would take help of their friends, cousins and try to chalk out a plan to get a yes from their parents. Some would just drop a bomb at the parents and tell them. Few used to get lucky and their parents accepted it immediately, while most had to take immense pain to convince their parents. While few took the painful route of running away and getting married as their parents were not convinced. All in all, things evolved over time.
But today I thought I should not write about those who fell in love with eachother and how they fought their way to get married and live happily ever after. Not those, where parents decided whom their sons and daughters should get married to. But I thought I should write about those, whose parents have given them the freedom to choose their life partners. Those who had or not had any past relationships, which worked or not worked. Whatever have been their past, they are those who have decided to enter the world of arranged marriage, to find their soulmate. Though we and our thoughts have evolved over time, yet the percentage of love marriage in our society is still low and the count of arranged marriages is still pretty high.
With evolving trends and technology there is a new concept that took shape, matrimonial websites, where young boys and girls registered their profiles, put their best looking pictures, mention details about them and their expectations and then the website does some internal calculations basis the expectations and return with recommended profiles. The respective boys and girls go through the recommended matches and select eachother, contact, then meet, talk/chat with eachother in the hope of finding their soulmate.
Actually earlier when it came to arranged marriages, the scope of matches revolved around friends’/relatives acquaintances, where some friend/relative would suggest a match and things moved from there. But with the help of these matrimonial websites, it has given the youngsters the opportunity to find their match, their soulmate outside that circle, anywhere in the world.
In this process of finding ones’ soulmate, the person searching goes through lots of ups and downs. However new and exciting it may sound initially, most of times it ends up as a tedious process. Some find their soulmates immediately, while most others take some time, it’s a part and parcel of the process.
While guys come across girls mostly who have regular demands/expectations, such as the guy should be educated, working, earning good enough, from a well to-do family, etc., there are some demands from girls that guys come across which are weird, which makes the guy think, sometimes it dampens his own self-confidence, sometimes he thinks how can a girl demand that. And its not just the girls, but even the guys come up with their own weird demands/expectations.
So at one end there are guys who come up with demands such as the girl should not only be educated, working, earning good enough, from a well to do family but should also be an excellent cook, should take care of her career and the house as well. From the guy’s point of view, those are all demands that are pretty normal and there is nothing abnormal about it, more so because he has seen his own mother doing the same, handling the job and home and family all together and not complaining even once. So for him it is pretty normal to expect all those things from his future wife, but what the guys don’t realise is that, the times have changed, the girls now a days aren’t like the ones of our mother’s generation. They are equally educated or probably more than the guys, have higher career aspirations, have much more demanding jobs than the previous generations, they no more have those work times of 9-5, they get equally tired and are stressed from work when they come back home and hence either have no energy left or don’t cherish the thought of cooking a sumptuous meal for the family. At the other end there are guys, who have some added demands such as dowry, gifts, big-fat wedding, etc.
The demands of the girls are equally weird, from asking a guy’s salary to be 1cr+ while the girl herself earns 2-3 lakhs to asking a guy to have 1-2 flats. From the girl’s point of view, these demands seem very normal, as she expects her future husband to be well settled and provide her with life after marriage as fancy as it was in her parents’ house, more so because she has seen her own father doing the same, from earning loads of money, to buying houses, to fulfilling every demand that his daughter has ever asked him and also spending quality time with his family. But what the girls don’t realise is that, things have changed a lot now, competition is much tougher at the corporate level, a guy has to balance between being more productive at work than others and giving time to his family, and more importantly, the girls have seen their dad’s only after few years into jobs and marriage, the image of their father’s is of the current life, after the person has spent some 25 years working and is more settled in their lives, have they ever thought or asked their mother how their father was, when they met each other, when they started their careers. It is so unrealistic to expect from the guy; of almost your own age, in a world where guys and girls get equal opportunities with respect to education, jobs, etc., and yet expect that he should earn 10 times more than the girl, have couple of flats, having a vehicle is considered almost mandatory, at least a 2 wheeler, if not 4 wheelers.
There are other more specific expectations of some girls such as the guy and the girl should stay separately post marriage and not with parents, the guys house should not have elderly persons. And most of the times, the excuse given is, that the girl is leaving her parents house and moving to the guys’ house, so why can’t the guy leave his parents as well. I’m not against it completely, as I understand that the girl would be entering a new home, a new world altogether, so its important for her to have her own space, where she could take her own decisions as well, which unfortunately in most of the joint-family houses don’t happen. But without knowing the guy and his family, straight away demanding a separate house, is something which I think is impractical.
Then there are expectations from both girls and guys on the looks part. Every girl would want a guy like Sharukh Khan or Ranbir Kapoor and every guy would want a girl like Aishwarya Rai or Deepika Padukone. The problem is, we have only seen these stars in films and in those specific characters and we don’t know how they are in real life, are they good life partners, we certainly don’t know that.
There is another nuisance in the marriage front i.e. the horoscope or kundali matching factor. Some people believe it some don’t, some blindly trust it, while some absolutely hate it. Now who ever have experienced this, you’ll agree that this horoscope acts as one of the critical factors in making or breaking one’s marriage, especially in the case of arranged marriages. And on top of all that, these people say things that sound more like verdicts and judgements rather than predictions. To start with, these are known as predictions, more like guesses not confirmations. Secondly these people who claim to predict your future on the basis of the horoscopes, are finally human beings not God themselves. Getting back to the importance of these horoscopes during arranged marriages, these people predict, and many people tend to believe that, something that is based on the girl and boy’s horoscopes, something that is derived on the basis of the positions of stars & planets at the time of the person’s birth. It is so funny, that they believe all this, and forget one thing, that there are actually only 2 things that are not in one’s hand, to decide self birth time and death time. So these predictions derived from horoscopes are simply based on the time of the birth the person was born, something that is not in the hands of anyone, and people believe & trust that, but refuse to accept the fact that life after marriage is in the hands of the boy and the girl.
Then there are caste issues where girl/guy want to marry the guy/girl from only a particular caste. There are girls who wants to marry a guy from a particular city, or wants to marry only on the basis of the degree the guy has (P.S. Doctors want doctors only, should have own business, only from BE background, etc.). I mean if we think realistically, does it really matter if the guy/girl is a BE graduate or an MBA, a CA or just a graduate. I can understand that the demand is that the guy/girl should be a graduate or for that matter even a post graduate. But selecting/rejecting because he/she is not a BE but a CA is I guess foolish. After all, people are looking for life partners and not offering a job. No one can predict that just because a person is a CA he can be a better life partner than the one who is a BE.
The other weird expectation is of the place/city one resides, that I recollect from an incident where someone I know was rejected just because he worked in an MNC in Mumbai and the girl ended up marrying someone just because the guy worked in US, not in New York or Los Angeles, but some small town in US, in fact so small, that there would be more people staying in Dadar than that town. You’ll find parents of girls boasting that their son-in-law is working in US. What they don’t realize is that, US doesn’t mean New York, or Los Angeles or San Francisco. There is lot more than that to US. I have myself been to US and I have seen the life there. What’s pitying is that these parents picture any place in US as shown in our movies, which incidentally is not the case. What they don’t realize is that just by getting their daughters’ married to US instead of in their own town, city or country, they are loosing out on the opportunity of spending some quality time with their son-in-law, their daughter and with time their grand children.
Ultimately what we all forget in this demands and expectations scene, is that, we had entered this arrange marriage market for finding our soulmate and not for buying/selling things. But what’s more intriguing now-a-days is the fact, that people run away from marriage, when parents ask them about getting married, settling down. The sheer thought of getting married to someone, committing to someone, the fact that life would be changing, would be different forever, is enough reason to make anyone nervous. Both guys and girls, want to be in a relationship, date eachother, but don’t want a lifelong commitment. Along with this, the new western concept of living-in, is something that more and more people here are giving a thought to. We like eachother, want to spend time with eachother, then why do we need to get married to someone and bind ourselves legally, is the thought process behind it. Also the increase in number of separation stories that we hear around us, makes us think, is marriage really required.
What has happened, is that now both guys and girls complete their education, start working, get settled in their jobs, take their own decisions, from buying things for self to deciding where to travel, from deciding what to wear, what to eat, what time to get up and with whom to go out with, they feel completely independent, especially because our parents have given us that freedom. But when it comes to marriage, the immediate thought that comes to our mind is, why is it required, currently whatever life I’m living, I’m happy with that, everything is going pretty fine, mother is giving me food to eat, father is making sure home is taken care of, I can go out with my friends whenever I want to, I can come home whenever I feel like, I can date or break with whomsoever I want to. Then why to disturb the routine that I’m having by getting a new person in my life, why to get into the nitty-gritties of marriage and that too with someone we hardly know. Especially with the fear in the mind about how the new life would be.
The problem is, we are too scared to change, adjustment is something we have never learnt and breaking is too easy an option for us than trying to mend it. We are born in a generation of advanced technology, where we get bored too soon due to immense options that we have, and change things, from our mobile, to clothes, to shoes, to vehicles and for that matter even our jobs. We often see that our parents joined their first jobs and never left that, mostly retiring from that same company, unlike us, we change our jobs within few years. It isn’t that our parents were less educated or less smart, that they never got better jobs outside their existing companies, but they knew or learnt the art of adjusting to the situation and mending things that were broken, something that our whole generation lacks. For us, if things don’t work, we change, we move, we shift, instead of adjusting. This same pattern is what we follow in our personal lives as well, when things go wrong, we don’t know how to adjust, we panic and break things. Probably that is the reason the divorce rate has gone so high in our generation in the last decade or so. For us, things start with a question in our mind, what if things go wrong, what is the guarantee that things will work like the way we want them to, so if they don’t, lets break them, or worst scenario don’t get into them at all, instead of thinking of ways to adjust and mend things. Unfortunately, with marriage too, we start on a negative note, due to the fear of change, that makes us think, that is marriage really a necessity.
Probably we won’t realise that now but some years later, that living life alone isn’t that easy. We are born in a generation where though we say, we need our space, we need our individual time, the reality is, we need people around us too, we come home at night from work, because we have someone waiting for us, now it’s the parents, but unfortunately they won’t be around for lifetime. That is when we would realise that we need someone ours, someone special, for someone we would like to come back home.
Probably that is when our new generation will feel that marriage isn’t just a formality, but a necessity.
So on this note, I’m closing this article, hopefully leaving many thoughts to ponder upon those reading this, hoping that they really change the way they approach, if not personally, at least post reading this article they would help their near & dear ones.
– A.K.
aadhar.kothare 