Getting married!!!

Well let me admit that throughout these past 27 yrs which I have spend on the planet earth I had been giving gyan to others on marriage and relationships etc etc…but now today when this Frankenstein monster of marriage is standing in front of me with his mouth wide open I feel all my gyan is leaving me alone to fight with this Frankenstein monster. More than feeling of happiness and enjoyment(as one is supposed to be or people smartly pretend ), I feel I am surrounded with apprehensions about future (which is always unknown),feeling of saddling up with responsibilities ,a different kind of qualm is surrounding me . Suddenly I have started seeing all my friends who have got married as some kind of knights who have won some battle and ever married men or women should have been embellished with some bravery award.
As someone rightly said There are only two tragedies in life: to have and to have not. And I am caught in this dichotomy of life. Various people are scaring me with their advices as one lawyer friend ( who himself is getting married in couple of month )gives me advice that marriage is a legal contract between two individual to create kinship , which is highly pro women in India and with all examples how a married man can land up in jail every now and then….. But I am wondering why the hell he himself is getting married. It seems after listening to all these examples that life of people have turned upside down and still they are making me believe that all this changes in their life has happened for good!!!! It remind me of my college days when ever we happen to see some very bad or boring movie after coming back to hostel when every someone ask us about the review we don’t forget to praise and eulogies it so that these people should also go through same torture and waste of money as we have gone through .I hope this is not the case this time ……
All elderly people seems to be believer in old adage that love is a temporarily insanity which is only curable by marriage. And they want it to be cures as soon as possible in my case .They say a known devil is always better than an unknown devil .In my case the devils is known to me I wonder how people would have dealt in case of an unknown devil !!!!!
I hope I would survive this change in my life.……. Amen!!!!!!!

What others will say???

Well I don’t know what made me write a blog on this topic at 2’ o clock in the morning, probably it was the discussion with one of my friends who has decided not to express his feeling to the girl he feels he loves as his family will not approve this relationship or just that I didn’t had much to do at this hour??? On further probing as to why parents will not approve, he said that “They feel if they approve, what others will say”. I don’t know who these others are whose opinion matter to them more than the happiness of their own child? I feel these others are we all as society. We as a society are outwardly focused, we know what all is happening in other families but are not aware of our own house. We should be inwardly focused, first our own house should be in order and then if we are left with some extra time then we should have opinion, suggestion etc. etc. for others.
But does this mean that we should not care for what others say and the social norms??? Does an individual have absolute freedom and should all these social norms be done away with??? Well if we give individuals absolute freedom then conservatives say that society will not work while the liberal mind feels if there are restraints in society, evil practices will increase which will lead to further complications.
We as a nation are under a transition phase and this change is happening very fast due to various reasons – economic and social. Our generation is stuck between modernity and tradition. We want to like the boy or girl we marry; at the same time we want 36 out of 36 gunas to match in Kundli and also want him/her to be from same caste or sub-caste so that our parents are happy (as it matches their value system besides others will not say anything). We want best of both worlds and this might not be possible in some cases.
Many things which have happened in the recent past are quite new to our society be it same gotra marriage in Haryana, or MMS clips of some Delhi girl or corruption in the army or the surge of Indian middle class etc. We all have good, bad, ugly opinion about these issues. We may love them or hate them but these are the realities of our society. As someone rightly said, “Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint, therefore, ideally free individual is responsible to himself.” I feel we should first be responsible to ourselves then to others and when we are in the role of others then we should also give space and freedom to other individuals. If we don’t want others to comment or evaluate our food habits etc. then we should also stop evaluation of other people’s lives and let them live in peace.
We are a society under transition and changes are sometime painful, we are even scared of positive changes as we don’t know its outcome and I feel same is the case with my friend’s parents. What we often don’t realize is that our small decisions are shaping the destiny of this nation or of this world so we should not hesitate in taking decisions we believe in, no matter what others will say; as the song of the film Amar Prem says ‘Kuchh toh Log Khahenge, Logon ka Kaam Hain Kehna’……..

Maghi Mela and Male Tyranny

Ever since I have come to Muktsar, I have been hearing a lot about the annual fair held at Muktsar during Lohri called Maghi Mela to commemorate 40 martyrs or Muktas who laid down their lives for Guru Gobind Singh Ji in the battlefield of Khidrana. Different stakeholders give different descriptions of the Mela; bosses describe it as the period when one would not be able to meet the targets or one would have bumper sales depending upon the industry one is working. Children describe it as fun time when schools are closed and they can enjoy joy rides in the Mela. The foodies told me that it is the time when one gets to eat different langars and one can eat as much as they want; on top of that they don’t have to pay for it. But there is another stakeholder THE MALE out of all these who has two descriptions of the Mela which are very different. But before I get into the description given by males, let me share my experience of what I saw when the mela began. The roads were flooded with people on 13th and 14th of January – the main day of the fair though shops and eating joints were open for almost 10 days. I was expecting many families to come to enjoy the fair but as they say expect the unexpected; 80-90 percent of the people were men. Although Punjab is infamous for its skewed sex ratios but its’ not so bad that for every eight males there is only one female. So where have all the ladies gone, I was wondering!!!

It was then that I remembered the description of the fair given by “THE MALE” in some of my previous conversations. This stakeholder has two kinds of description depending upon what role he is playing; if he is in the role of son, father, husband, brother, or boyfriend, his description is completely different than that of the MALE. The father, son and those in similar roles describe it as the time when there are lots of people on the streets of Muktsar and ladies get ill-treated by the male counterparts. Men try to take advantage of the crowd.The MALE inside them describes it as an opportunity to see or feel the fairer sex more closely. I think this is the irony of a sex starved nation that the brother, son etc. is not allowing ladies to come out or do what they actually want to. It is our own thoughts as the MALE about the Mela or career choice or general outlook towards life that tends to dominate our views on how the ladies in our family should behave or act. If we are not happy with the fact that we cannot enjoy Maghi Mela with our mother, daughter or wife, we first need to change our thoughts for others’ wives, daughters, or mothers. Half of the problem would be solved that way. I don’t know how many ladies who showed up in the Mela got ill-treated, but I am sure irrespective of age most of the men must have appreciated the beauty of the ladies or judged them on their appearance; if not in public at least in their minds. This appreciation is preventing them from letting the women of their own families to turn up for the Mela; this attitude also makes them condemn those families whose women have come out in the Mela for not taking care of them.

What I feel is that both the descriptions of the Mela are within one individual; when it comes to our own families we have one yardstick and for society as a whole we have a different yardstick. We forget that we are not different from the society but a part of it so our special set of rules for our families has to submerge in our rules for society. Till the time that does not happen I do not know in how many more Maghi Melas to come, children will have to enjoy joyrides without their mothers.