ONLINE 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 relationships 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. Sometimes even Aunts/uncles would also dabble as agents for the sheer voyeuristic pleasure. The standard requirement for the bride was that she should be fair, pretty; have long tresses, be 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 prospective girls sizing each one like a cow in a showroom; while she demurely serves tea and refreshments to the groom’s party, her mother extols 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 girl’s 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 was to remain ignorant of real life and imagine forever, slowly the lessons of anguish would 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, then the children arrive as an emblem of your catharsis and you embark on another traditional chapter of your life.
There was a paradigm shift in the sixties when newspapers spotted the commercial possibilities and the matrimonial columns appeared in the newspapers which gave greater choice. But advertising for partners carried a certain stigma well into the 70’s until social changes women’s empowerment etc arrived 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. The ads themselves are entertaining, revealing with expanded internet lexicon adding to the humor and innovation.
Brahmin teetotaler/status boy seeks lovely educated bride, caste no bar/Convent educated/ veggie, non vegan/ started appearing it later widen the scope to include widowers and divorcees. The advent of IT, internet as multimedia vehicles launched a billion dollar industry that gave a fillip to lonely hearts and changed the relationship of the sexes forever. Today every portal, newspapers and magazine carried matrimonial ads though 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 and uxorious minded men, are also indulging in fake ads. The big shift occurred after the software couples with their conspicuous consumerism discover that they are not compatible within 1 to 2 years of their marriage. With the disintegration of the joint family system and no emotional blanket to fall back on, the statistics gets increasingly scary each year.
The ubiquitous cell phone has 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. Today you are only a click away from finding your soul mate and “marriages are made in cyberspace”. The heart is no lonely hunter as there are a million sites where he can happily hunt. Now you can get a bride by mail order or online shopping. With social economic changes sweeping the country the latest document to hit the market is the pre-nuptial agreements.

Thus the era of the marriage broker and isolated society of those times with its associated drama and sentimentality has been replaced by the new multimedia composition. The times have changed pushing the perimeters of the traditional wedding envelope, to break conventions in an age of spontaneous seduction & fleeting sense of joy, a symbol of a virtual aesthetic advantage. No more waiting for the tears falling on the women’s “Pallu” to forge a new critical attitude towards life.

DESIDERATA!

The root of all our problems is that we want to possess everything in life. A woman wants to possess her mate, or the rich and powerful want to possess beautiful women in the manner that they own Mansions, Yachts or Art works. They are individuals without individuality. They sometimes have no perception of the true beauty of the spirit, but want to flaunt the external beauty like a trophy. When one’s perception is at a higher level like that of an artist, poet or enlightened person, they are in a position to understand that the beauty of the spirit cannot be owned by any one individual. It has to be shared or projected for everyone to appreciate it. The splendor of a sunrise or a beautiful work of art, sculpture or poem creates great value and beauty and is beneficial for the whole world at large and not for a privileged few to own it. It is essentially a celebration, a glimpse of perfection, a thing of joy in an imperfect world; all the more haunting and elusive lying for eternity. We are in a revolt against the limitations imposed by our own mortality;
Extravagant expectations can lead to the deepest questions of human existence. Desire is ultimately unstable and we spend our entire life in its pursuit. When we realize the futility of this and give up trying to acquire, only then can we climb out of our primordial chaos and replace our desire to own with a lust to live life to the fullest.

Neither poem nor prose posted with remorse!!

S…… is an alphabet that connotes the sacred and the scary like a winding road up the mountain side. To replace sugar with saccharin is like being invited to the cellar and offered apple cider; this can also cause peptic ulcers or even cancer. Spices do much delight to our taste buds and may be the vice of eating, but it also eats out the lower intestine; and salt may replenish dehydration in the summer heat, beware of the swollen tongue.

Smoking also adds to the salty effect of hardening the arteries which can lead to a failing heart! To counter this we have a drink to dilate our blood vessels and sex they say is good for the heart. September lingers in the death of summer, a month of nostalgia and tears.

And Satan the prince of darkness brings the scar upon your soul, the specter of foreboding, and a spirit best ignored as it stinks of death. The first act of war is to topple the temples of the enemy, to seek is to never know and safe in the security of a sanctuary is he? Suffering is pain and speaks for its own sake, to suffer may be noble, but it is still a pain.

He who is confident will arrive at death, after he has truly lived his life. In the glow of December, here I stand kneeling with the cadaver of my youth, dragged away by the obscure events in my life, I turn like a corpse buried in the harsh winter of strain and stress. Jaundiced like the bourgeois whose life has no tears? Ah! to begin from scratch, like death reborn to the unrepressed love that invades me. –Vinay- unmuzzled ox.

SEX, LOVE AND MYSTERY.

Everybody wants to understand the secret of handling the sexual impulse. It is one of our profoundest mysteries the wild heart of our evolutionary heritage, a great mystery. Physical intimacy is undeniably one of the strongest instincts of human nature. To make love is to taste delight, to know the beloved by entering and being entered, is to join our desires with compassion.

To give and to take joy, to trust, to make ourselves vulnerable, to be generous, it takes precedence over our finer feelings and perceptions. Misery is because of our inability to control a perfectly normal impulse and when we treat it as something base, instead of a holy force.

And yet this primal function of our nature is the constant butt (pun intended) of jokes and method of debasement……

To screw, (a bastardization of the noun) is to sexually couple by conquest, to undermine the will, or take something away from the partner, if only for a momentary release. A kind of violent masturbation, flung upon another member of the human race, a loveless task, and one who screws to defame is called a seducer, a rapist. Sex is always viewed from subjective experience; biological, physiological, but never from the spiritual. Love cannot exist by sex alone; we need some higher form of emotion or feeling to sustain it.

When the fireworks of sex are over, the embers still smolder beneath the surface. The complex realities of our emotional and psychological selves have to absorb the multidimensional consequences of sexual intimacy, which can have both positive and negative fall outs. Life comes out of it……. Sex has tremendous beauty; you cannot repress it or defeat sexual energy. It should be respected; life has happened out of it, if one understands it, you can evolve and use this diverse universal energy correctly, then the possibilities are infinite.-vinay-

Where are Muslims happy??

They´re not happy in Gaza.
They're not happy in Egypt.
They're not happy in Libya.
They're not happy in Morocco.
They're not happy in Iran.
They're not happy in Iraq.
They're not happy in Yemen.
They're not happy in Afghanistan.
They're not happy in Pakistan.
They're not happy in Syria.
They're not happy in Lebanon.
They're not happy in Indonesia

So, where are they happy?

They're happy in Australia.
They're happy in England.
They're happy in France.
They're happy in Italy.
They're happy in Germany.
They're happy in Sweden.
They're happy in the USA.
They're happy in Norway.
They're happy in almost every country that is not Islamic!

And whom do they blame?


Not Islam... Not their leadership... Not themselves...
THEY BLAME THE COUNTRIES THEY ARE HAPPY IN! And they want to change the countries they're happy in, to be like the countries they came from, where they were unhappy.
Try to find logic in that

Platonic, Physical and Spiritual love.

Sex is beautiful it and it makes the world go around. Just like any other need in our life, we should not neglect our physical sexual needs. Physical intimacy and love work in tandem, increased sexual activity helps increase our love. This is a cosmic process embedded in our nature and part of our ongoing evolution. Sex deepens and broadens our minds; it elevates us to the next level of consciousness. Sexual activity like spirituality improves the overall mental and physical health of both partners, to give and to take pleasure for the joy and gratification of our partner as well as ourselves.

It is the vicissitudes of culture, society and the prejudices, of those obsessed with the myths of religion that impede our progress of sexual awareness of our self. We are not truly liberated because our society is not emancipated. If we break free we can realize the celestial potential of the love within us.
We have to question our religious and moral beliefs conditioned over the years, injunctions about the worship of god’s, sacrifice, sin and penance which were laid down by people who were not as evolved.

The vanquished skepticism lives on fully preserved in the body of the established theological texts. When sex is in a normal healthy state, one’s appetite will be infrequent, it must be treated as an act of love & bliss and never of shame, if one has to get out of “the lower” joy into a “higher” bliss. The process starts with falling in love with the physical beauty of your beloved and then it is transformed into intimacy. Physical intimacy can happen with other beauties that will then become your object of attention. Attachment is an illusion and therefore everything physical is less real than the ideal or true form of love, which can be attained only if you are detached. When the cycle repeats many times one finally reaches the ultimate form of mental love which is referred to in different terms, i.e. “platonic love” or “spiritual love”. In this state the physical and sexual intimacy does not happen.

From a dualistic perspective both are possible at the same time. Since physical love is strongly linked to procreation it can take on an ephemeral quality, a sort of eternal love. The real understanding that one must realize is that there are higher joys before which sex is a mere distraction & no longer an emotional or physical necessity. Spiritual or platonic love is the high road to bliss and is much more sublime, but to attain this state one must be satiated and have no more desire for physical sex. This is then the higher realm in the ladder of evolution

Break down the great Wall Street and occupy their wealthy homes.

“There have been tyrants and murderers and they seem invincible , but in the end they always fall, think of it, always” M.K.Gandhi. Under Gandhi an entire generation dedicated itself to the cause of freedom; ironically another generation has driven the country into the morass of crime and corruption.
Gandhi’s statement succinctly sums of what is happening around the globe. From the Arab spring of dissent against tyranny and dictatorship of the Middle East to Anna Hazare’s revolt against corruption in India and the clarion call to “Occupy Wall street movement. The specter of revolt has ignited the minds and imagination of all the people in the world.
Anarchy all over has sparked and grown these revolts into an amorphous global movement. Justice has always been blind and is a paradigm of people frozen in the past. It is interesting to note that in these movements there is a heady mix of intellectuals, blue collar workers pacifists, Marxists, idealists, pragmatist’s ; men and women cutting across, class, race, religion, countries to form an egalitarian group unified in spite of their differences. Often the truth and the intent lie in our perception, rather than facts. Perpetrators of these evils are divorced from ethics and good governance, dispensing justice is reduced to a mere technicality, just like the fine print in their marketing texts. The Greek tragedy of large chunks of sovereign debt, the tottering Italian government, the lobbyists, dictators unemployment in the USA, the recession and corruption are now in the collective cross hairs of the people who are taking aim to set in the reforms needed.
Along the course of history we all believed that it is morally correct to repay debts, but the debts of large companies and governments which are never repaid are passed on to unwary individuals, whose debts, loans, mortgages and credit card out standings are foreclosed with a vengeance. The influence of money in politics has created the financial crises, leaving the inhabitants of the of world to fend for themselves in the wake of the collapse.
Risk is a pet commodity in Wall Street and an extremely dangerous commodity when it falls into the wrong hands. The villains of corruption are investment bankers, big business, politicians and administrators, recently the lobbyists have also come into the limelight. Like the wicked witches of Halloween, whose insatiable greed has caused the meltdown. The results as seen are foreclosure, unemployment, homelessness and poverty; while most people toiled day and night to make a living and cared about the poor and unemployed, many exploited this naivety and wanted to profit from human weakness and misery. The shenanigans of these evil super villains are now out in the open and even their Armani jackets or Saville Row pin striped suits have been stripped and like the emperor’s new clothes they all are now naked. In times of evil the laws is a mute, deaf and blind spectator and in the shadow of Mammon all business practices are heretical, till the motivated vigilantes take over center stage. There are no easy solutions in the fight against tyranny, corruption and greed. Those fighting ruthless opponents with no moral scruples in chaotic times deserve all the support and luck in this cruel world.
Real prosperity comes only when common welfare for people is built into the system and happiness becomes a by product. Until then like the born again skeptics we all will be misguided at the fate of humanity.- Vinay-