Thursday, March 24, 2011

Bharat Matrimony

My parents had the good fortune of not hunting for partners for their children, as all of us made our own choices and plunged into doomed relationship or institution called marriage that would change our lives forever.

The ultimate objective of parents was to ensure that the children were married and the term euphemistically described was “well settled”. In the olden days there were breeds of agents called “marriage brokers’ who practiced this niche trade often called match making. The standard requirement was that she should be fair, pretty; long tresses, coy, a good cook and what they would call domesticated (like a cow or dog). Benchmarking the groom was not as elaborate as only his job profile and family background was required and if he was a teetotaler /nonsmoker it was a bonus. Professions in demand were Doctors, IAS, Bankers, Engineers, Government servants though not necessarily in that order. Apart from the basic requirements of family background and trivia another important criteria was the matching of horoscopes. It was a time consuming exercise in the absence of data and communication networks and the marriage market had an elaborate and costly etiquette which had to be followed. Marriageable men tend to like coy women, who are young, beautiful, fertile and intellectually unthreatening. Once the basics are sorted out the boy with parents in tow visits the numerous girls who are prospective sizing each one like a cow in a showroom while she demurely serves tea and refreshments to the groom’s party while her mother outlines her various virtues and capabilities. Once the boy approves the girl the game goes to the next level of setting financial conditions for the engagement and nuptials. The standard term was “dowry” though of late it has gathered a derogatory connotation due to bride burning incidents in the North. The amount of dowry was directly proportional to the groom’s job standing and the girls desperation and deficiencies, this was one of the easiest ways to get” bread easily” build a corpus for those who seek the one great and insatiable commodity “cash”. So if the bride is dark, short, fat or ugly the dowry amount keeps increasing empirically and if there are any hint of character indiscretions then she will have to pay a heavy price.

The final objective of marriage is to remain ignorant of real life and imagine forever, slowly the lessons of anguish will set in, always as a shock. The implication is unsettling, yet to carry on the charade is to pretend otherwise. Life will become absurd and unbearable, till you crave for oblivion and want to disappear, till the children arrive and you embark on another traditional chapter of your life.

There was a paradigm shift in the sixties when the matrimonial columns appeared in the newspapers which gave greater choice. But advertising for partners carried a certain stigma well into the 70’s when social changes, women’s empowerment etc which broke the dominant patriarchal relationship that was prevalent.

Now lonely spinsters could use the anonymity of the columns to search for their soul mates. Women professionals entering male dominated professions gave a further impetus and improved the Lexicon with Brahmin Teetotalers/ status boy seeks lovely educated bride ……… appearing……. Convent educated/ veggie, non vegan/ later widen scope to include widowers and divorcees. The advent of IT, internet as a media vehicle launched a billion dollar industry that gave a fillip to lonely hearts and changed the relationship of the sexes forever. Today every portal, newspapers & magazine carried matrimonial ads through couples are still hesitant to reveal that they got married through matrimonial columns. There are some scary statistics going around about the spiraling divorce rates and cheating which is the outcome of false information published by these people looking for partners some conmen / fortune hunters & uxorious minded men, some indulging in fake ads.
The ubiquitous cell phone as also added its digital momentum to the increasing number of marriages on the brink of divorce due to indiscreet messages that adulterous couples / lovers exchange on mobiles.

With social economic changes sweeping the country the latest document to hit the market is the pre-nuptial agreements.

The big shift occurred after the software couples with their conspicuous consumerism discover that they are not compatible with in 1 t0 2 years of their marriage. With the disintegration of the joint family system & no emotional blanket to fall back on the statistic gets increasingly scary each year. The ads themselves are entertaining, revealing with expanded internet lexicon adding to the humor and innovation.

Thus the era of the marriage broker and isolated society of those times with its associated drama & sentimentality has been replaced by the new media composition. The times are real pushing the perimeters of the traditional envelope to break conventions in an age of spontaneous seduction & fleeting sense of joy, a symbol of a virtual aesthetic advantage.
The times are real, waiting for the tears falling on the women’s “Pallu” to forge a new critical attitude towards life.

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