arrangements for an arranged marriage (1)

(In response to : http://isiganesh.blogspot.in/2012/10/about-getting-married.html)

Being the only son in your family, has mostly good outcomes.... inheritance...for an example.... (Ganesh might disagree...because he has always done everything on his own... but in his subconscious he knows that there is a good amount of cash in his father's savings account...and so do I about my father)......apart from inheritance, being pampered and being TOLERATED by everyone in the family is a thing which we both agree....you enjoy ordering good meals.... and you know that good food will be ready for you...if you are at home... no matter what....your wishes are hardly overlooked.... and you do not really have to share anything with anyone else (because like me you might not have any siblings...or after a certain age your sisters will get married and go away...)...this much for being the only son....

Glorifying this status is not my intent for this article.... so I need to bring out the real issue.... marriage.... now my peers will contest...that marriage is a problem....for everyone...whether or not you are the only son.... but I claim that the problem .... becomes harder, difficult or even np-complete when you are the only son.... (google 'np-complete' if you don't know what it is!)

If I were to justify why...this problem is np-complete ....I would give a one-line statement- "because your parents (include siblings, cousins, family members close to you- if applicable) want to fulfill all there wishes in your marriage!!!!!  ALL- because no one else is going to do that for them if you are the only son!! As a consequence, you are left to choose from a very small group of people.... I am sure you begin to get my point……. Lets prove it with more concrete examples…

Note in the subsequent text I am going to address the set of {parents, siblings, cousins, family members close to you} as ‘THEY’ and its derivatives…..

(a)    THEY want that your marriage should take place with all the customs and rituals of the traditional (in our case Brahmin) Hindu society. Hence, this rules out the possibility of marrying someone outside your traditional society…..  If you had a brother or two, THEY could have enjoyed all the traditional stuff in those marriages and left you alone even if you wanted to marry in court with a Latina per se….. but not an option here!!  (I am living in the US for past 2+ years….. and subsequently this leaves me with an option of dating from a very dire minority…. You have the same troubles… if you are south Indian living in North or vice versa…..)

(b)   THEY might want that the family of the girl should be having similar (actual same) traditions, values, customs. Plus that family should be able to gel in smoothly with yours.  This is as good as telling you that you must know about the family even before the girl herself.

(c)    In the traditional Indian procedure, the horrorscopes (read as horoscopes) and the pictures are exchanged before anything else. So you would be able to find a girl who matches you intellectually, after she has surpassed the cruel test of horrorscope and facevalue.  The problem with this? You leave out a big set of individuals who might have matched intellectually, even though the horrorscope or pictures weren’t up to THEIR expectations.  AND EVEN bigger trouble…. None of the girls with correct horrorscopes and pictures might match u intellectually……

You can take a small instant off and decide for yourself that THEY have reduced the set of possible brides to a very low minority, and there is more to come. Another thing you might wonder is, where the fudge are you (the person who is getting married- the only son) getting involved? Correct, you are not supposed to get involved in the initial filtering process!

(d)   After THEY have actually filtered out someone and you feel that she is matching you intellectually, the next thing is will she accept or reject you? If you are accepted, like my friend Harish recently, you are a winner! 

 

(e)   If you are rejected, then you go back to the step (a) and repeat the loop until it converges to some finite value. Never mind the age or the time it takes, just because you drastically reduced your options because of THEM.

But what if you are not as lucky as Harish, and what if after marrying a complete stranger the marriage doesn’t go the way you wanted it to (read as: your marriage is unsuccessful)? That’s a question that THEY don’t have an answer for or might not even care for.

When I tried to tell THEM about all these problems, THEY came up with a nice solution, “Then why don’t you go and find someone for yourself. We don’t have any problems till qualifications (a) to (d) match!” What? Are you kidding me? The data set is so damn reduced that it is almost sure that it will take infinite steps for the loop to converge. Then THEY might be sometimes able to relax certain constraints, but I am not sure that a girl from outside will be able to adjust with THEM!

So either stay unmarried, or give in to THEIR whims and desires. Or run away and get married (which you will not do since you are the responsible son, and you will be held responsible if something happens to THEM).  A cute question that my friends (specially non-Indians, mostly Americans) ask me, “What if, you come across someone who does match all or some of the other requirements and THEY are able to accept her?” my answer is “Will she accept THEM?”. Moreover, since we were mostly engaged in becoming great sons till now, were dedicating all our lives in studies, and jobs to the extent that the dictionary definition of people like us is nerds, we didn’t come across anyone like that. Is it too late? Yes, girls whom I knew of are already married or committed and I don’t have the time/ capacity/ patience/ smartness (read as guts) for finding a different person.

 Am I blaming someone (read as THEM)? No not at all, the only person that is to be blamed is me because I couldn’t guess beforehand that such a situation will come one day and I must be prepared for it. As one of my friends says, “You were being casual, not working as hard to find a girl as you were in your career! Because you thought that THEY will take care of it!”  So finally I will let THEM take care of all these things!!!!!  When? Not now….because like Ganesh, haven’t made up my mind yet whether this life (alone) is better than the one which is impending?

I must say you are the luckiest, if you met someone, fell in love and then got married. You are the second luckiest if you got married to a person whom you knew for a long time, even if you weren’t in love. You are the third luckiest if you were able to choose amongst a large group, you dated the girls for some time (at least some months) and then decided. Then comes the category of my friends like Harish (although he might claim that he is the first luckiest); and if you are amongst the sacred (read as scared) class of people like Ganesh and I then decide for yourself…..