Traditions are not as bad as you think

What can a good campus placements do to you?

It can take you to the levels of inactivity which you start to hate. This is worse than hibernation because during that time the insect sleeps, but this 4 years stay in IIT has transformed me into a guy who can’t sleep more than 12 hrs (this is the maximum, when I spend 4 hours in the bed waking and thinking about sleeping). I have two projects and one mid semester exam coming up right after I come back from home after my holi vacations; still I am blogging for no good reason.

This writer inside me is like a small baby, who doesn’t go to sleep until I do the bed time story reading for it. And I have to read more stories when a new book comes into picture. The same happened today. I was reading blog of a person called sunshine. She is an independent girl who is against any kind of arranged marriage and for that she has had a fight with her dad too.

Hence the agenda for this post is arranged vs. love marriage(AM vs LM). The same old boring topic, about which many of us written essays, attended public debates and at least given a fair bit of thought too. It used to be fashionable to debate from the love perspective and it seems it still is. If my mom reads this post she is going to hang me upside down, because she doesn’t want me to even think about marriage so early. My friends would say I am a typical despo iitian. Well, I am a typical despo iitian but still marriage issues are too far away from the realms of my present thinking arena.

I would use the typical GD pattern whose hangover still aches my head because the number of GD’s I attended and got thru was quite a bit.

What is marriage?

Some would say an agreement between two individuals to live together. Some would widen its scope to say, two individuals living together who complement each others emotional, physical and all kind of needs. But as usual I am not the part of these few. I would widen the scope even further to what last statement says, “In my view marriage is much more than the needs of two individuals, it’s an agreement between two families to support two individuals live together and make a new, productive, beautiful life.” Although the use of word ‘agreement’ may be debated and words like blessings of two families etc. can be used. But I would stick to more professional and urban and polished perspective. ”Aaj kal itna time kisi ke pass nahin hota hai yaar, except for lukkha despo iitians like or unlike me”

I may have widened the definition by including families, but in the same breath I have narrowed it down to Indian perspective too. But since the article I read was in Indian perspective I can take the liberty.

The arguments given in favor of love marriage are all known and well discussed(Writing like this, reminds me of my social study papers in class 10^th where I used to outscore others because I used to write everything point wise and madam used to like that)

• Compatibility of individuals is already decided
• Girl gets more freedom in this case because her vote counts equally in this case, and this vote carries forward after the marriage too.
• Lots of love between the individuals (as the name itself suggests).
• Two individuals know each other for long times hence conflict resolution becomes easy.

There could be many more such points, but the moral of the story is pretty clear from these few.What could be probable disadvantages of a love marriage?

• Absence of family support.
• Economic instability (which may be an offshoot of the absence of family support.
• In Indian context the two individuals’ party to love marriage wouldn’t be in a live in relationship before the marriage, so there could still be practical incompatibility issues unresolved.

Now I would use some well established notions which are in favor of arranged marriage.

The divorce rates in western countries are much higher as compared to rates even in urban India. Although the system of love marriage is the only system that is practiced in west, except for a few countries like Italy. They have refined it and perfected it with live in relationships at times going for more time than the real marriage.

(A digression: The long term impact on the metal health of children brought up by single parents or fighting parents isn’t denied by any psychologist either.

Compared to that, Indian children grow up getting the love of both the parents, resulting in much lesser psychological disorders rate in the society. )

I didn’t have enough enthu to go on websites and find exact percentages, and there would be people who could debate those percentages themselves, hence I have gone with the general perceptions.

Now let me shift the focus to the so called old, rotten, unfashionable stuff i.e. arranged marriage. When I talk about arranged marriage (A.M. /= Arithmetic mean), I am taking a more practical and modern perspective here. This in effect means that the bride and the bride groom know each other, there families know each other. They have met a few times.

How would such a pairing differ from our Love marriage pairing? A.M. wale belong to similar surrounding, probably similar economic background even caste etc. On the other hand in LM the pair might be coming from two radically different backgrounds economically as well as socially.

Here come the practical compatibility issues which I believe make or break a good marriage. If I don’t eat onions and my wife only knows how to cook food with onions, initially I might try and eat onions because of my love, but we have to remember that I haven’t been eating onions for last 20+ years. It may sound a foolish argument but a coffin needs lots of nails, and it might be the starting one. Matters can become worse in case of a veg - non veg pairing or drinker - non drinker pairing. These factors may seem minor hiccups, but when we talk about all our life then they sound really important to me. And adjustment is always not the best route. There are some things which are ingrained, engraved upon our minds. If they are tickled or tampered with, gradually frustration builds up, and that’s why we see the success rate of love marriages in India is much lesser. This can be attributed to lack of female self reliance in our country, but I believe that cultural differences in our country are too much for many of us to adjust or manage.

Assuming that only half love marriages get parental approval from both sides, the trouble of social seclusion also starts to play a big role. (Here I have taken half because it was a good engineering assumption. When an engineer has two options 0 and 1, and only one choice to be made- The one from IIT Bombay would make ½ half as his answer)

I consider family support as a necessity for success of any individual or a couple. Firstly we owe a lot to our parents and I don’t have energy, enthu or will to fight with them neither i find necessity to do so. Secondly I have a firm belief that they aren’t going to push me into a bad relationship. And even if the relationship goes sour, I have someone to blame.

I believe that madly running away from the traditions is not the path to modernization. After all, traditions are nothing but experience accumulated for centuries.We need to rationally analyse and then take decisions. There are some traditions like dowery or sati (I am a rajasthani and it still happens ones in a while over there)which are not to be supported at any cost, but that doesn’t mean, everything said in the name of culture or traditions is rubbish. We might be loosing some really important, worth while things in that case. Lets not reinvent the wheel in the name of progressive thinking.

So what’s the conclusion!!!

Jiski jo marzi karo, lekin thoda socho yaar
Your parents have done a lot for you.

ak