Thursday, October 14, 2010

Marriage- Arranged Marriage

India is an unique country. For me tolerance is the greatest virtue of we Indians, probably the greatest evil as well. Tolerance of the wrongs and injustices has allowed society to degrade. Howsoever loud we may try to shout at the success of having organized CWG, the magnificence of its opening and closing ceremonies, and bask in the glory of the historical medal tally, the hardships and injustices an ordinary citizen has to face and tolerate for daily survival makes me paint India as a degraded society.

Does our degradation stem to a large extent from our marriage system? What marriage should be? It is supposed to be association of two soul-mates for life-time or till it lasts. With homo-sexuality being permitted in many societies, sex of the soul-mates doesn't matter. But let us talk of man-woman marriage. Does arranged marriage fulfill this requirement? If we don't try to deceive ourselves, answer is simple and clear- 'No', more often than not 'no'. At the time of marriage it is a blind whether the two individuals will be successful in becoming soul-mates. They don't marry because they were soul-mates or they felt they were soul-mates. They try to become soul-mates after marriage. I know from my experience and that of those I know closely that very often they don't become soul-mates and continue to tolerate each other with their best abilities. They become miserable for rest of their lives and in many cases life becomes curse. That won't be so if taking marriage as a fate-accompli, they concentrated more on positive aspects of eachother's personality than the negative aspects.

Through arranged marriages we are not choosing the personalities. We are choosing wealth, status , beauty, 'khandaan' (the lineage of ancestors), job etc. We are not choosing the personality and definitely not 'soul'. Life becomes an ever continuing exercise in adjustments. Is it what we want to get out of life or do we want it to be full of intrinsic joy?

Times have been changing and arranged marriages have been giving way to finding of soul-mates by the concerned adults, generally known as love-marriages. It is often said that such marriages are not lasting as arranged marriages do. What should be more important for an individual- a happy marriage or a lasting marriage? Of course, nothing like it if it were a happy and lasting marriage at the same time. It is also true that broken marriages result in related problems, mainly concerned with the children. For welfare of the children it is necessary for marriages to last. Here the problem becomes a bit complicated.

If love-marriages fail and break, it doesn't mean that arranged marriage is a better arrangement. It only means that the two adults hadn't found their soul-mates and had married for some other considerations. The more the adults find real soul-mates for marriage, the happier they will be and better the society.

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