Marriage – an institution of 'love' or 'Coercion'?

A lot has been happening with regard to marriages recently and a huge chunk of population in the country is still way behind in BC (read – Before Christ) times in terms of their attitude towards it.

Of what I have learnt and understood of marriage in the 2 plus decades that I have lived, it is an arrangement where a male and a female start living together, to share their thoughts, lives, relatives and a lot more and ultimately for reproduction i.e. to help the world go on with enough number of people living on it at any point in time (to continue legacy’s, to put it differently).

In the past, marriage was more about some older generation people having not much to do in their free time, so they spent quite some time to find an ideal ‘family’ (mark my words here, they looked out for a family not a bride or groom) for their boy or girl ( I literally mean boy or girl here, it wasn’t man or women, heard of child marriage?) and once they found a family that they thought they would gel well with, irrespective of the fact that whether the boy and the girl would be able to spend the major part of their lives together ‘happily’ or not. All that mattered to them was their compatibility with the other family and certain other material things, to put it graciously.

If we talk about marriage today, the context is completely different and rightly so to an extent*. It’s an institution through which 2 humans of different genders spend a majority of their life together, for which they need to like and understand each other, so that they can bear with each other and can be there for each other at times good or bad, happy or sad and simultaneously can help the world have more people to live in and happily if possible.

The most important criteria today for the younger generation to get married is love. If they think they don’t like someone, they will seldom marry him or her (as far as they are courageous enough to speak up to the otherwise egoist world about their choice & liking). While we still are fighting the likes of khap, intracaste, inter caste and so on. We hardly seem to understand the logic behind such traditional burdens we are carrying. Some religions/ castes are against inter caste marriages, some are against intra caste marriages and some are against love marriages to be more specific. To my mind all of them are wrong and are only selfish and cruel to the right of ‘loving’ (can I call it ‘living’?). They want to compromise with lives of others, supposedly for the sake of some self created/felt honor. They are imposing self created beliefs which mean nothing if thought rationally about.

Let me pose a simple question to solve a major part of this marriage riddle. Did Adam and Eve know their Caste/religion/gotra? We have come a long way since Adam and Eve and we have learnt that they are supposedly the ones who began reproduction in the universe of humans. It is our older generations that have created such sects and sub sects as we have increased in numbers in the world. And to put it bluntly, they have done so to serve their own ego’s, selfish benefits, likings and many other such individualist reasons. Why should we continue with such illogical practices that have been imposed up on us? We are following it just because we have never questioned their existence at the first place.

I have observed some positive change in the younger generation recently, though only a few instances, they look to me like a huge step towards a better future. It’s about couples abstaining from mentioning their caste in certain places where that information is sought. Not just for themselves but even for their kids. In one particular case a couple did so because the husband is a muslim and the wife is a hindu, so they simply dint want to decide what caste their kid wanted to belong to. They thought that it was his choice whether he wanted to be known through some caste, if at all or doesn’t want to flaunt one like his parents did and he could take that decision the day he is grown up and mature enough to take a call on this divide and rule game. But the couple had to face a lot of problems before having made their point clear and still face tough situations at various places.

My thought on what should be the deciding factors for a marriage are summarized below, though we still have problems including dowry, domestic violence, female foeticide and many more such problems looming our society at large even today. In an ideal society we must, just let ‘love, liking, compatibility and understanding’ take over ‘caste, creed, greed and religion’ while choosing a groom for a bride or vise versa. As the former are the most important ingredients in any relationship and not the latter, which are just artificially created barriers that most of humanity still fails to understand fortunately.

* Let’s not get into the same gender marriages, which if not mentioned to do the least here while talking about ‘marriages in today’s context’ would be utterly ignorant of me. Though I am completely against that idea as its against the law of nature and so I think I would like to not comment much on it as I am not supposed to make judgments on other peoples lives, they know their own life and world better I guess.

P.S – This post was triggered by the incessant inhumane acts of the khaps in the northern part of the country, highlighted in the media lately. Such devilish acts must be condemned and the people behind these ideologies (at least the idea of taking lives, if nothing more or less) taken to task.

Today’s Favorite Line – Competition in life is necessary but in love, it just might be fatal.

Today’s Favorite Song – Love Don’t Care (Firehouse)

Grow up OLDIE and let us too!!

We often complain about progress in a lot of things in our life as citizens, as humans. We say the government has not done much for infrastructure, for education, for poverty, blah blah blah, yap yap yap, buk buk buk. Hold on!! Have we ever thought about ourselves? How far have we progressed in our thinking?

We are still the same old British ruled creatures who keep getting imposed up on. The only difference is, now the imposition is more to do with thought process and its outcome and not as much of slavery as during British rule. We haven’t progressed even a mile in terms of maturity in thinking, in thinking ahead, in adapting ourselves to the changing time and ways of living. We still take all the shit that people around us give, just because they think something is right, are we obliged to take it as they give it to us? Let’s stop taking it!! Who do they think they are? They aren’t doing any favor by sharing their wisdom or experience. They are, simply said, just dumping their own view on us by exhibiting it as a ritual or so. It’s a plain white ‘lie’, is how I see it.

Lets take a few examples of how things have changed in decades and how different things are perceived now vis a vis how they were being perceived in the past supposedly.

Disease – It’s easier to start with a topic that at least most of them would agree with me on. If someone would have uttered the word ‘cancer’ a few decades ago or for that matter even a few years ago, it would have meant only one thing to anyone whether literate or illiterate, the word would have only related to end of life, ‘death’ (whether soon or a little later). So generation over generation, people started believing in that and lost hope. Scientists around the world have been working hard to find a cure for it and thankfully to an extent there seems to be some relief and cure for some of them who caught this deadly disease.

But today if one utters the word ‘cancer’, ‘death’ is not the first thing that comes to ones mind, its dialysis, treatment, cure, hope or life that comes to our mind. To quote an example we can look at the story of Lisa Ray, we read and understand that she fought the battle and survives today trying to lead a better life. There are thousand such stories today and the numbers are just going to increase manifold in the coming days. I guess the older generation better start believing in the future and the youngsters who are working hard to make it a better one.

Cricket - Now coming to a sport that a large proportion of the country follows. If we would have spoken about cricket say 3 decades ago, we would have nothing more to talk about than test match, bouncers, West Indies, defensive batting and so on. No mention of the terms money, cheer leaders, doosra, sixers, 20 – 20, power play, day – night games (in fact soon we are gonna have day- night test matches!). It’s clear that with time, we have come a long way. A lot of things have changed and a lot more will change with time. But if we still keep talking about how a team batted for 3 days continuously in a test match and the match ended in a draw, people would laugh at that team and of course us; it’s not the way we play cricket now. So instead of complaining about how people/money have changed the game, lets take what’s more relevant today and how to make it better with how its working better today. The veterans have no other work, they have already retired, they are obviously expected to speak highly about the past, but how does it matter? They aren’t the ones who are gonna play the game now, are they? So it doesn’t matter as much as to what they felt like while playing the game then and what they miss now.

Communication – Our grandparents would tell us, we used to write letters and it used to take 2 weeks or so for it to deliver and so on. While our parents would tell us we used to make trunk calls and at times we had to wait all day before we got the line free and so on. Now with the launch of 3G technology, we can communicate live from anywhere at any time seeing each others face and for as long as we want. If an oldie still is against such stuff because he/she dint have access to it during their times, ask them to get a life now! We have it now, are we still supposed to listen to those people who don’t even have an idea about what we are doing, why and how?! Think of a scenario where instead of these oldies grumbling about the advancement and the way youngsters use it, start trying to understand it and use it for their own good. But no! They have to impose their thoughts (wisdom), don’t they?!

Marriage – Its one of the things that we are most backward in our thinking till date about. We to an extent have progressed in our approach with a lot of other things mentioned above, but when it comes to marriage we are still old wine in old bottle stuff. We have neither changed the wine, nor the bottle (if that sounds like a saying at all). Earlier it used to be 2 families getting together into a relationship through 1 person from each family and the affair would be concerned more with the families and not the bride and the groom whose lives were at stake ultimately, but the oldies wouldn’t care less.

Now marriages are more concerned with the 2 humans whose lives are going to be affected the most and we seem to think that’s the better way to approach this institute of love and life. But can we ever get rid of caste, khap, honor killing, sati, child marriage, female girl killing and so on? We have all these problems in abundance even today across the country. Can the thought leaders of such chauvinistic attitudes ever find a rational behind their acts? Where have we progressed in these issues yet? We are still many centuries behind with our approach to these issues of immense importance to every individual life on earth. It’s all just because of the thoughts of the older generation who are so myopic, that they don’t want to see progress; they can’t bear a better life for the younger generation, because they themselves haven’t lived one, how can they see their younger generations live happily after all? 

Education – To my understanding, the older generations studied only for one reason – to secure a job. There was no other meaning to them when it came to education. It did not mean progress or innovation or growth or intelligence or wisdom and so on. All it meant to them was, ‘it’s going to secure me a government job’. A good proportion of people in the country have realized how important it is for them to enroll their kids to school, instead of using them for chores or working on farm or doing some kind of bonded labor. But there is still a majority of population spread across the country which doesn’t understand and realize the importance of education and how it can make or break lives in today’s context. Children are still used on farm or as bonded labor (agreed that in certain cases it is because they can’t afford it, but it’s not the same in all the cases, I guess we needn’t worry about it now though, RTE has just arrived). This requires a radical shift in thought and attitude towards the life of our beloved. Education would certainly lead to a better life no matter where one lives, what one earns or thinks like. Need I mention about the reservation system we have in our country that the older generation has believed in firmly for the last 6 decades and more, which is literally killing the country and its younger population in some way or the other. The more we dig deep into the reservation problem the lesser it is. It is such a big mistake the government has down in decades and more so lead by a lot of old generation power houses to seek votes of people whose lives they are working to not be better off ever, so that they keep getting their votes for ever by highlighting the reservation favor.

We need a huge thought revolution (like the green revolution), which puts sense into millions of people who are fooling and billions of them who are being fooled by a lot of bigoted people. We need to adopt progressive thinking, the world is changing a lot for the better and even more for the worse, but we need to still adapt to it for the better, by not staying regressive. If we stay regressive worrying about the world getting worse, we’ll get no where, we need to understand that first.

It’s a humble appeal from a novice to all the oldies out there (across classes, castes, generations, colors, genders, regions, professions, literacy levels) – Please kindly stop imposing yourself and your thoughts on the younger generation. They don’t need your wisdom; it is no more relevant in today’s context. So kindly get with them and acquaint yourselves with the current trends and try to work together for a better life both for you and them.

Today’s Favorite Line – The older I get, the younger I want to be and the younger I am, the older I want to be. That’s life!!

Today’s Favorite Song – Man in the mirror (Michael Jackson)

Why blame the IPL

If players don't perform to their potential in under pressure situation on tracks that don't go with their comfort zone, is IPL responsible?

Who is to blame when you play only 2 seamers and rest slows bowlers on tracks that suit pace men more. But for Suresh Raina and to an extent Rohit Sharma (for a lost cause) all other batsmen failed in the World Cup. What happened to our Pathans and Yuvrajs and the captain cool himself? All of them failed miserably. Most of them were disappointments even in the IPL except for a couple of knocks here and there in a dozen plus games played by each of them. So did IPL sway them to continue their poor form? Not at all, it gave them a much required chance to have some match practice in fact, that too against the best bowlers from across the world. The same Mallingas, Mathews and the Pollards are the ones whom they played with and against.

If IPL is responsible at all, then have a look at Mahela Jayewardane, no one in their wildest dreams could have ever thought this guy could adapt so well to this format and win games for his team almost every time with brilliant knocks. Now you should also say IPL is responsible for giving him such a nice platform and opportunity to let him tune himself according to the games needs. There are many other players who continued their form from IPL or bettered it in the world cup. If Indians couldn't do it, it’s not for the IPL to take the blame. In fact the top 5 batsmen in this world cup at this moment are all who played in the IPL as well - M Jayewardene, KP Pietersen, C Gayle, J Kallis and S Raina.

But was it not known even before the start that Indians are miserable against short pitch bowling? So why select people who are not time tested with short pitch bowling even if it was the shortest version of the game? The team selection was not to be made based on IPL like conditions for heavens sake, the world cup is being played at the Caribbean land!

The team failed in several departments including poor captaincy by Dhoni, picking wrong sides, choosing to bowl when anyone on earth would have chose to bat, selecting more slow/spin bowlers in the team when the conditions are tailor made for pace men. It couldn’t have got any more worse.

Indians performed miserably on the days when they needed to fire all guns. The crucial thing for a team playing any tournament is its fitness level and the performance of every individual player on the match days, which in India’s case was lackluster and so it lost and that it rightly deserved to say the least.

Let’s stop using the IPL, its money and the late night parties as an excuse for a blunder which the players did on the field.

Today’s Favorite Line – ‘Patience is not much about waiting; it is more about how one behaves while waiting’.

Today’s Favorite Song – Aye Khuda (Paathshaala)

What's Superior - Religion or Law

This is a very very tricky question; the answer more often than not would be different in different contexts. But it’s a really important question at this moment in India.

We all, in our lives as civilians are expected to follow or abide by two things as per our social setting, religion (am taking the discretion of treating caste also as a part or an equivalent of religion as it’s just another form of division) and law. There are two interesting cases that India at this moment is debating and arguing about, two completely different contexts but they both involve religion and law as the center piece of the argument and more importantly life of someone at stake as the backdrop.

Case 1 - A boy and a girl from certain rural parts of the country love and marry without approval of their families and society. As they married with in their family (they are siblings), it was out of question for them to seek approval of any of the above before their wedlock. The khap panchayat sees it as dishonor to it and ordered killing of the couple for this misdemeanor wholly supported and backed by the family of the guy/girl. When the doors of justice were knocked at some court, the honorable court condemned the ruling and act of the panchayat. (For complete story here)

Case 2 - A 20+ guy from across the border infiltrates into our country and mercilessly massacres dozens of lives with his companions and unfortunately (for him) survives while all his partners in crime die in the process of this mini war. After playing hide and seek in his response to the Special Court trying his case for almost a year and half, he finally is found to be guilty of the crimes he did which the entire world saw bits and pieces of every now and then on different forms of media. He manages to get a death sentence on several counts, bringing some sort of closure to the kith and kin of the victims. Majority population of the country is praying for his execution immediately without any delay for him to play any other games with the friendly law of the country (he was given the food he liked in jail, he got a lawyer for free to prove he was innocent, though all of us knew he wasn't innocent, more over he got such a royal treatment, on day of the verdict he appeared in the court in a nice white kurta pajama. Human rights people got him nice treatment from the cops & what not).

Both these cases deal with death as the verdict, in one it’s given by a caste based outfit and in another it’s given by the body of law in the nation. As far as I've known and learnt, no religion teaches to kill, none of them teach 'an eye for an eye' behavior. But still the khap panchayat managed to kill young guys and girls for loving and marrying in the name of honor, in multiple cases. Whose honor? For whose sake?  They only loved, they only got married, and it’s in order with the civil society's code of conduct. Why worry so much about caste? Is death the only way out? Will they get back their honor by killing those innocent, loving humans? All this was done and the law of the land couldn't do much, instead the khap panchayat advised the judicial body to not interfere, such a shame. This is a total disregard and ignominious behavior towards the legal system of the country. How do we punish them?

In the second case, though majority of the population wants kasab to be hanged ASAP, there are a lot of people who are actively lobbying towards banning or revoking capital punishment in the country. They say, our religion and leaders (spiritual) have not taught us to kill. We have always been taught to be merciful, to transform people from being wrong doers to being good humans. The judge while giving his judgment mentioned that reforming kasab is out of question, he is a killing machine and deserves only to die. In this case death has been awarded for killing, contrasting to the first case where death was given for loving. But now law sees killing as the only option while religion says reform is still a way that could be tried. We shouldn't start this game of tit for tat or tooth for tooth.

I am very confused as to what my opinion on the second case is, while am very clear to my mind that in the first case killing the young couple was the most brutal acts of crime post Hitler era. While the killing spree that kasab and his team went on for was as atrocious as it could have got, for which reason my mind says kill kasab, hang him, hang him now, don't give him any more time, he has already got 18 months of extra life, he should have been shot at site the day he was caught (not that we have got any extra ordinary links or clues while having him in our custody, he has been taught well enough to hide and die rather than speaking the truth). But heart says did your religion and gurus teach you to be supportive of violent acts? Agreed that this violence is to kill a killing machine and is also endorsed by law but don't we think so much even before hurting an ant in our daily life? Now we are talking about killing an adult. Will this do any good to further terrorist acts or will it deter them from pursuing such inhumane crimes?

The side affects of executing or not executing him could be any of the following as far as my mind can think.

1. If he is not hanged, his handlers would use this as an example to enroll many more kasab's into their gang by assuring them their lives even if they were caught (just like kasab).
2. If he is not hanged, they could do a kandhar type hijacking they did few years back to get him free and then we'd lose both justice and may be lives of our loved ones as a few paid their lives during kandhar.
3. If he's not hanged, we'd have to take care of another terrorist in our already overcrowded jails, we'd be spending money on his life for several decades, that money could be used for some developmental activity in the country to stop terrorism. We have already spent a lot doing a fair trail while keeping him alive and in the pink of his health.

1. If he's hanged, may be LeT may plan another attack to show retaliation and revenge(his hanging is a non incident for them to cut down their terrorism, they sent him with a plan for him to die after the attack, unfortunately for them their plan failed in his case causing some distress)
2. If he's hanged the confidence level of the Indian citizen in the law of the land would increase manifold (it already has to a great extent as we tried kasab very fairly and are giving him what he deserved best - death)
3. If he's hanged may be many other criminal outfits will take a lesson out of it and slow down on their delinquencies.

There can be many more arguments for and against the life of this animal in the form of a human. But I am not really able to decide what’s superior to me, Religion or Law; head says the killer doesn’t deserve to live but heart asks, is that the only way out? This is a real life test and let law take its own course and religion do its own thing. After all law says – Satyamave Jayete and religion says – Live and Let Live. Neither is worth ignoring, so let’s just be truthful and accommodate nice things in our life, as truth has won its battle and justice has been done, now it’s a test to our religious beliefs, is this man worth to let live? I don’t have an answer, do you?

Today’s Favorite Line – There is anger or sadness behind every smile (mostly)

Today’s Favorite Song – So Sick (Ne-Yo)

What about now

I was the topper in high school…

You were such a nice guy when you were a kid…

I will be a billionaire some day…

You are spoiling your future…

To all these statements I have one question - What about now?

What are you today? What do you think today?

Are you happy, successful, well mannered, responsible, etc today? Now?

I basically subscribe to a school of thought that doesn't believe in past, doesn't listen to or agree with what the ancestors or earlier generations did or thought. It doesn't matter what and how they thought about certain things and how they dealt with issues or circumstances.

They did what they liked, the way they liked! They must not have necessarily followed or agreed with their own ancestors. None of us actually ever bothered to check that, not that we could check it actually. So why are we being forced to follow them or their thoughts/views?

They had their reasons for doing the things they did the way they did.

• They got back home before sunset because there wasn't light in their times, so it was best getting back home safe early.
• They dint go to disco cos there wasn't one.
• They woke up early in the morning because they had nothing to do till late in the night so they fell asleep early and weren't feeling sleepy anymore in the morning and of course since there was light only in the day they better did what ever they wanted to in the day. They walked miles cos there wasn't a vehicle back then or they couldn’t afford it, if at all there was one.
• They used to talk only for a short while on phone because it either wouldn’t get connected for long or it was costlier than robbing a bank.
• They ate more natural stuff because they hadn't invented the stuff used to make these junk/fast food which got invented much later.
• Who said they dint have ailment like sugar, bp and so on? There wasn't a lab out there for them to checkout so they never knew and just lived with it in denial.

It’s all rubbish when people use past instances and future predictions to dump their views on you.

• We get home late cos we are busy meeting friends or doing our own thing as evening is the only time we get after office/college, why not use that time?
• We get up late cos we hardly slept for a couple of hours by the time they woke up, don't we need some rest? What’s wrong if that's our lifestyle in the changing times?
• We have the convenience of transportation so why not use it?? What’s the point in comparing by saying ‘in my young days I used to walk so many miles', who cares?
• We talk on phone for long cos it costs just a handful of peanuts worth money to talk for a while.
• We consume more of junk food cos we have improved taste buds than they probably did, is that our fault really?
• Disease was not uncommon during any period in humanity and neither will it be in the future, so why always crap about it?

Talking about the future, no one knows what’s there in store for us tomorrow. We could be anything, anywhere, we just never know. No amount of experience can predict tomorrow in these times when change happens like the speed of lightning. So no amount of gyan on future is of any use, its better they rather shut it.

I firmly believe, the younger generation is a victim of false information and self opinionated guidance which doesn't necessarily have a empirical evidence from past and even if it does it is most likely going to not work in the future, cos with time situations and a lot of other things have also changed. Experience is the most irrelevant thing in today’s context. What you do or be now decides your now, not someone else's experience from past is gonna do any trick. In fact the use of past examples is a trick to fool you, to get your actions and thoughts under someone else's control. The older generations are just adamant and dictating which is neither good for them nor for the younger generations.

Respect for all is the call of the hour. So stop getting fooled by useless wisdom from the creators of history at their own will and handle your situation your own way. All you need to be asking yourselves when ever in doubt is - what about now?

Rest will following automatically!!

P.S – This is just my take on living, probably it feels harsh and rude but don’t forget that’s how life is. If humans are not easy on change they either will be left back or will keep fighting their ego and get no where. I guess older generations should get a little easy on the younger ones so that we could live in a better world where the thought divide is not as large as it is today. This is just an attempt to bring to fore a certain common examples that everyone could relate to, can come up with many more examples though, but this probably is not the right way or forum, one sided affair. Just wanted to emphasize on the importance on now and progressive thinking.

Today's favorite line – Past is a cheat and future is a liar.

Today's favorite song - What about now (Westlife)