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)
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