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Harish Shah on being an Indian youth of “marriageable age”.
The flight takes off more than four hours after it was originally scheduled to. It takes a while after take off for the inflight entertainment system to start working. Amongst the movies on demand available for the flight are Road Hogs and Pursuit of Happiness. I decide to see if there is any Indian offering available and find three options. They include Namesake, Dor and Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna. Not having been to a cinema to watch an Indian film in more than four months, I decide to check out the Karan Johar product, because this writer is a sucker for Amitabh Bachan films, even if it means putting up with a forty year old Shahrukh Khan trying obviously too hard to play roles suited for someone in the early or mid-twenties.
No, this is not an inflight entertainment review, nor a movie one. However, the story of the film raises much of what the story is about that this writer is trying to tell here. The film is about two couples. In each couple, one spouse loves the other unconditionally, totally and devotedly. The other, is simply there, unhappy against all odds. The two unhappy ones fall in love with each other. They have an affair. While their spouses are out one night celebrating a mistaken “rekindling” of their marital relationships, the two married lovers book into a hotel to “consumate”. They divorce their spouses after deciding to break up and save their marriages. They meet again three years later and end up marrying each other.
The film is not a literary masterpiece, but the story seems very convenient, very easy. Real life though, as mention the wise, tends to be far more complicated. Real life emotions tend to be a lot more overwhelming. The impact of costs is far greater in magnitude. Divorce is not as simple as signature on paper. If you subscribe to most Eastern religions such as Sanatana Dharma, there is no such thing as a divorce. A marriage in that case is a spiritual bind for seven incarnations. Although it is easy for one in this day and age to absolve one’s self from such beliefs, especially when faith in higher orders is declining, it is probably not as easy to live with such encounters in reality as it might often be depicted on the silver screen.
How do two people who do not love each other, marry each other and hope to spend the rest of their lives together? Well folks, in the Indian community, that is something that has apparently been happening for centuries now, with the adoption of arranged marriages, a product of cultural contamination resulting from interaction with foreign civilisations earlier in history. This intertwined with many societal malpractices drastically contradictory to earlier values such as child marriages, subordination of women, castism, dowry and Sati.
And over time the above practices have been normatised and have been accepted as normal. Now, the miconception is widely embraced as religious doctrine, that these are justified customs, favoured by the Gods even. It is not helped at all, by the fact that the rise of cults and rogue orders in Eastern spirituality and mysticism has also seen ancient scriptures rewritten to accomodated and further endorse the practices arising from contamination resultant from foreign influences in history. And history is witness, that such is the nature of society, that if a child is abused for a day it is wrong, but if abused everyday for a period of ten years, society has a tendency to see it as something that is right, something that is correct.
However, to speak of the history of arranged matrimony and all the intertwined issues to do with relations, marriage and society is to digress from the real subject of this article. However, the mention to this extent and effect was necessary to explain the backdrop against which the intended issue here is featured.
And so, I pass some of my time on the flight from Perth to Singapore knowing what awaits me back home, watching a film the subject of which has much to do with that which awaits. And when I landed, I could not escape the realisation looking at my mother welcoming me home, that I am an Indian youth in my mid-twenties moving back in with his folks after a couple of years away. And I knew my folks were not going to spare any opportunity before I move out again, to entice me into submission to the process of a tie-down otherwise known as the wedlock.
“Its about time”, says dad, on my second day back in the country, in a conversation that comes to be out of nowhere.
“My mother is telling me its time and I want to be a grandmother too”, adds my mother. “All our relatives are waiting to walk in the procession, to see you bring home the bride.”
“Well, a guy can’t wed without a bride now can he? I haven’t got one”, I respond. And then I realise the error in making that statement before them.
“There are lots of girls in the world, we’ll find you one. We go to India by the end of this year and hook you up with someone”, retorts my mother. I am sitting there slapping my forehead. My folks had an arranged marriage but knowing the history of how it found its way into the Indian society and the history of marriages predating that in the heritage, it is a definite no go for me.
Most Indian friends I have around my age are either married, engaged or will be by the end of the year or early next year. Some of them have kids or are expecting.
The questions do come, when are you tieing to knot? A simple matter is often overlooked all too quickly, that marriage is for two. Well find someone then, they tell me. Another simple matter too easily overlooked here is that you cannot exactly take a walk down Orchard Road, Singapore to this great place called Takashimaya and purchase a bride for $99.99.
And there is this matter of age; if you are in your mid-twenties or somewhat around there from an Indian family, you are likely to hear the comment that it is the age to settle as after that “all the good ones will be taken”. Is there a guarantee though that you will find the right one if you choose to or attemp to “settle” at or around that “ideal age”.
And bride or groom hunting is a a concept that I find flawed in and of itself. The moment you begin the “hunt”, it becomes a game with a time preasure attached. It denotes a criterion that is thought up met with predictors developed or assumed to ensure the criterion match. Reminds me of Human Resource Management 3344 at university, the way an organisation is staffed by matching candidates to the jobs. Just as managers in corporations make bad hire decisions because in no province of commerce is there a fool-proof concept or process (ie, Enron), people do end up with the wrong partners in matrimony. Just check out the rising divorce rates, locally and globally. Why then rush into a bond that is meant to be permanent when the risk of impermanence, often woeful, is so high?
A bond that is permanent, for a host of reasons logical to the optimum, is one that necessarily has to be founded on trust. In the age of promiscuity and eroding values, that in and of itself is a factor majorly challenged. Them whom you see like angels at the Temples, you also see flaunting the devilish nature of themselves at the Saturday night dance, where there is little of dance and more of moral decandence. Off course morality is a relative concept, with little room if you have chosen to retain your Indian roots and the identity that comes attached. It is a world where chastity matters. And it has a rigid definition not theoretically engrained but emotionally and spiritually so. It does not matter if you are spiritually absolved, it does if you are not.
That is where the dilemma begins, where the old generation maintains beliefs in ideals far outdated that should never have been at all in the first place and the new generation retaining its identity meets unparralelled challenges in preserving the world’s oldest heritage.
The paradox is, that preservation comes through regeneration resultant from procreation. And so then it becomes an onus on my generation of consciounable Indians to procreate, to engage in timely matrimony. Then again, should procreation and matrimony be an onus? Or should it rather be a right for union of souls in love as defined by the very scriptures defining eastern spirituality by which vows and rituals for such relations are prescribed? And hence my generation stands at the crossroads….
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