Stop Gap Arranged Marriage!!

 Every kid in this country grows up listening and trying to live up to Indian values and American dreams, balancing the act of techie engineer and a hot-shot MBA. Aspiring for Ivy League & ending up in ‘Main-Bhi’ league. So, while he might have been competent and scored well enough to have studied in the architecture department of the best institute in the country, the social stigma associated with less than engineering and a love at gun-point/second attempt with physics makes him pursue engineering at a non-descript college. The joke becomes sarcastic when you end up pursuing MBA, right below an architecture department, only seven years too late. But then you can-not make somebody love forcibly and thus the outcome in most cases is a wannabe writer. And this means of becoming a writer does not impress parents and they forcibly make the kids abort the idea before it becomes mature enough. . However, it does not end at that and you land in jobs that are not meaningful or better say you do not understand them at all. If you thought that the ordeal is over, there is this arranged marriage one has to fall in love with. Thus, YLOO (You Live Only Once) and that too with the wrong person. Life becomes a Stop Gap Arrangement rather than the latter being a method of joining the pieces together.

    So, while you always thought that this one is the last stop gap arrangement and after this I’ll do what I love, only to find yourself up against the great wall of ‘Stop Gap Arranged Marriage!’. It stands literally for everything we settle for in life and figuratively for whom we settle with. The literal part is also bitter in taste but can be swallowed with a glass of compromise but its the figurative part that leaves a lifelong bitter taste in mouth. Some of you may differ and somewhere and take sadistic pleasure in the fact that you are in love with somebody and being loved back as well ( the important, less probable and irrational part). To all those of you :Didn’t you go weak in the knees for Ranbir or Katrina/Priety/Anushka.?Or closer in your life, which we foolishly assume to be the only real thing because these plastic perfect people do exist. How about that girl/boy who was three years senior but looked as equally young at heart and body or even lower ?. Or the one you backed off your thoughts from just because they were committed and very loyal at that. No points for having given it a shot and then backing off with flowers for somebody else in hand and a cliche as favorite quote ‘Life is like that so better move on !’.

    The society also glorifies this act of succeeding in a compromise. And thus we live, suffocating the dream of being ‘Prince Charming’ of our respective Princesses. And the argument that GoI did away with the princely states and princes does not count. Hopping from one thing to another in search of that break and break-ups as well. The skewed sex and seats to student ratio makes sure that you wish and pray for break-ups and breaking even in the exam, more than your proposal being accepted. It’s more and less for girls, most of whom are brain-washed about the magical day of marriage and the life thereafter. The day which anoints instant Princess-ness(Also, there are some men who equally look up to getting married and that is being perfectly normal). More, as the disappointment is more and less as the ball is always in their court and they just want to frustrate the opponent or score a self-goal.  And thus fresh batches keep feeding the fire of Stop Gap.

   Thus we become cunning, willing to walk over a fallen man to get out of this mess as soon as we can. Man/Batsman down gives secret pleasure as batting is done in order and for most of us that order is decided democratically based on arguments that defy logic.  More break-ups means more fish in the sea, it might not help you but it will help somebody and that somebody could be you someday and thus you become devil’s /divorce advocate. And why not, let the best man be her man rather than him settling for becoming ‘Best Man’ letting her go by her wish and choose the wrong guy as in ‘Namaste London’ and saying goodbye to your dreams which has her as the permanent & only cast. The dream where she says yes blushingly to your asking her out. Enlightenment strikes and the girl wakes up from her day-dream & decides exactly at the time of the wedding ceremony that the guy she has feelings for is all fake and runs away, and that happens only in movies. In real life, she runs away from the right proposal and towards the Stop Gap Arranged Marriage. Sincere apologies to the fairer sex but you have this tendency to choose the wrong guy while the right one was standing right there, thereby becoming the biggest facilitator of ‘Stop Gap Arranged Marriage’, which I believe is the root of all problems including recession in IT. The guys are to be blamed equally for being the girl when it comes to expressing, forget expressing, even talking to the ones they want to. This wrong of arranged marriage cannot be done right as its meant to be for a lifetime.

    Thus, we settle for a compromise tantamount to locking the bull by its horns and it might prove fatal to control the bull called destiny. The practitioner of bull taming would tell you that its not an animal to be easily tamed and should have been better restricted to being the work-friendly ox. But the optimist in you does not want to starve an enemy and then defeat it. You want to take things head on as they come but then be ready to bleed if your miss to register the detail of their strong, pointed and long horns. 

    In our mechanized life, destiny has ceased to have meaning except for feelings and feelings are drying up to the extent for family and close friends and certainly the one with whom we end up. A stop gap is something which was not meant to be and owes its existence to the unavailability of suitable options. It’s a stage beyond which lies our destiny and before which lays our search. But then complacence fills in and  you start liking  what you are holding and the promised and promising person keeps waiting till we come.  The shorter its span the better it is. And thus there has to be too many stop gaps to reach where you want to be.

    A strange comfort is accorded in this arrangement and the world needs to be shaken out of its slumber .How about being a firm believer in love and that it happens and not done, step by step, beginning friendship,  and doing things you feel like/love . How about looking at things upside down?. We need to think more about what we want to be doing and take straight line paths than circuitous routes to reach there. Having said that, its always advisable to have a stop gap planned but do not jump to take it and should be the choice of last resort. It will save the day for you and you get some more time, more time to prepare even harder and take that jump out of the Stop Gap Arrangement.
 

    Going by the dictum of what is socially and has parental acceptance, is not always a recipe for misery nor is it always right. We are here to commit our fair share of more than 3 mistakes. Some of the times we should live in the moment and not in an arrangement. Also, when its not meant to be, Stop Gap Arranged Marriage becomes your savior/companion who/which will stand by you when nobody and that certain somebody does not. This piece in itself is a Stop Gap Arrangement and I am not very proud of it but then it’s a desperate attempt to get out of it. Good thing that the government has banned Child Marriage, waiting for the day when the stop the childish Stop Gap Arranged Marriage. Do what you feel like, screw the Stop Gap Arrangement !!

The Predicament of More than Friendship!!

Remember, that awkward (read all weather) friendship that you had with the girl/boy in high school, which became a fuel for gossip. Make no ‘Miss-take’, I am not talking about the guys became ‘Bro’s’ & girls became ‘Sis’ with. The predicament of more than friendship is that it happens and leaves you between the rock and a hard place. However, a few rebels find the experience comparable to the weekend trip to the Hard Rock café, flirting with the idea of more than friendship with a blessed minority everybody wants to be more than friends with and they, not interested.

  More than Friendship is believed to be a feasible solution only when certain criterion is met i.e. an equality where the girl is equally interested in the boy and invalid for all other situations. However, since more than friendship function is basically a summation, the equation should remain necessarily valid for all inequality cases. So, the result of the function should be friendship in these cases rather than a slow and gradual death of friendship which unfortunately is the case most of the times.

  More than Friendship is also misunderstood as an unexplained phenomenon where the sum of parts when tried to strengthen even more, leads to the collapse of the whole building. Structurally speaking, the likelihood of that happening is an impossible event. The only explanation to its occurrence could be weak foundations. The argument in defense of this irrational approach is gaining ground and has lead to confrontation between the residents of the Friends-land and their ability to coexist. In the name of ‘space’, we keep looking for mental cramp/camp. However, what underlie this human behavior are its insecurity and thus the urge to grab more land in the name of personal/breathing space, ending up encroaching on others. Widening our mental horizons is pushed to a corner by this imperialist expanse and as historic unplanned development stands witness to, prefer separate buildings each for club, gym etc. But then things began becoming complex with time, the more they were separated, the more they got entangled. 

  

   A constant fear of being left alone in the maze of the world makes us keep things separate so that in case of untoward events, we have people to fall back upon. And thus mushrooms, multiple small units of dwelling in blatant disregard of safety norms awaiting an emotional shake that will raze all of them to ground. Dwelling units, dotting the landscape all over, eating up the green space and slowly suffocating to death its residents.  In admiration of the enigma associated with a pack of cards standing in triangle formation,  we overlook the fact that someday it will suffer a setback, that will collapse it to the ground, and that too like a pack of cards.

    Man’s fantasy with basics of chemistry has him fixated and turns a blind eye to the civil engineering that lies beyond. One of the many ways to define love is in terms of chemical reactions and that’s the reason why chemistry tuition have always been a mystery for parents and had catalyst like properties for kindling love. The tricky part being, there is always a displacement reaction or environmental conditions that will break the bond of love you thought was unbreakable. And that happens due to a highly attractive Mr./Ms. ‘Awesome/Amazing’,  either on exposure or under impression of fictional novels. Thus there is a need to take ‘love’ ahead of the +2 standards to a Civil Engineers lab. Even though I am not entitled to or qualified  in that area, I assure you that it won’t be a blunder if I traverse into this unknown territory. It cannot move far beyond chemistry as the largest of structures owe their strength to the properties of elements they are composed of.   

      As in building any structure, we need to clear the ground first and then lay the foundations, the foundations of faith and trust.  Then we let the wall of friendship take shape over it. You build it putting one brick a day, and it’s a possibility with all the explanations, to sometimes fall in love with the structure. You start liking the structure, though its only a wall, but to you it becomes the finest work of architecture. To save it from the evil forces of nature, like any sane man or women would do, you try to cement it with the plaster of love. And roaring come the bulldozers of moral municipality, trespassing your property, razing it to the ground and it does not stop at that. You can't even complain. Their act is legitimized by the universal penal code of morality, society and all those words ending in 'ity'. The worst part is that the friend is always a party to this razing down of the playing field.

     Thus, more than friendship is like the goodies that comes along free, in festive season. The marketer may be hopelessly optimistic and keep the offer running for certain regions which do not fall for a higher end, upgraded product or in the promises it makes .The general line of thinking is that everybody who gives goodies is cheating or the product being offered is of cheap quality. If one does not want the goodies  fine !, someday some honey will find it a value for their money . But the complete refusal to buy shatters the imagination of the advertiser into tiny little pieces which can’t be pasted together by even Fevi-stick. No doubt, the marketer wants to sell but ignoring all his promotion and advertisement shall someday make him exit the market or worse shut shop altogether and its not a good thing for the overall market. The promotion will always say ‘Take me Home’ and it up to the buyer to decide whether they have space in their heart/house for it. The advertiser can’t and should not be brought to the book for having tried.

    When I look back from where and how it began, ‘The predicament of More than Friendship’ has run its course and has taken a very long and arduous course. It survived many checks and dams, fell from falls and still survived and its time now to say goodbye. Oh no !!, don’t you think that this river is going to die by calling it a day in some bay. This river was meant to join the purest and holiest of them all, with or without her permission, today or tomorrow or the day after. No matter how long it takes and where it takes it, its destined for it and shall wait for the terrain/moment that encourages/allows its merger or acquisition. Selfish as it may sound and as I am, my intentions are loud and clear, to be associated and bond with the sacred of them all and achieve instant God-ness.

    By no means, The Predicament of More than Friendship’ is a testament on the burning issue which had my fingers burnt more than once, but it certainly is my testimony and I stand by it !!