The season of marriages

Now-a-days, whenever I check status messages of my friends, alteast one new friend has updated his/her status to "xx-days to go". Its not hard to guess what this means, this is a season of marriages and all of them are going to have their D-days this year. This list is ever-growing but for now includes Adi (Aditya), Nishu (Nishtha), Nivedita, Parul and Rachna. Except for one case, all others are typical arrange marriages, the strangest reality in today's time. Tell it to an American or an English guy and see how his jaws drop in awe. How can two people decide to spend their lives together just because their parents thought so...they hardly know each other. they do, this is INDIA.My heart goes out to all those who take up this challenge and give their best effort to prove their parents correct (and most of the times they are successful in doing that too...unbelievable :O).

We are also seeing the emergence of a third kind of marriage in India. The boy/girl finds his/her partner (usually from his/her own caste) and tell his/her parents to get done with the formalities. It sounds as if its love marriage, but its not. It is another type of arrange marriage where you meet your prospective partner with the help of sites like shaadi.com (and sometimes even orkut/facebook :P... atleast adi will agree). You talk to that person, take your time and let your parents know once you have found the right person. The period of interaction is much smaller than love marriage but larger than the traditional arrange marriage.

I feel happy for those who have found their life partners this way. To find the right person is becoming an increasingly difficult task now-a-days and its not very hard to see why (naah, I am not even talking about the skewed sex ratio). The search for Mr. Perfect (or miss Perfect) is the most daunting task just for this one word....Perfect. Every person looking for a bride (or a groom) carries a list of "expected qualities" and almost always, no single person satisfies all the criteria and hence the search goes on and on.

Lets take for instance, the list of a boy searching for a bride. The list almost always has these qualities listed:
1. must be beautiful (implied meaning: fair and with good features)
2. must be well educated (implied meaning: engineer / doctor / CA...gone are the days of BAs and MAs)
3. must be working (more often than not its there on the list)
4. must be homely and a good homemaker (implied meaning: should be good at cooking etc)
5. must take good care of parents
6. must be of my caste (a very important criteria to begin with but the importance decreases with increasing age :P....once the age closes on 30 and the search has been on for 3-4 years...this criteria goes away :D)

Now quite generally, atleast in the present generation, either the girl will be a good homemaker (as per the definition given above) or working. If she has both the qualities, she may not be that beautiful. And if she poses all the qualities given above, she will either have a boyfriend (and a prospective groom) or she will have an even bigger list and the boy will almost certainly not satisfy all the conditions in her list. This reminds me of one Akshay kumar dialogue " Jo hume chahiyen, unhe hum nahi chahiyen aur jinhe hum chahiyen wo kisko chahiyen". This is the condition of most of the people looking for partners in my age group.

So what is the solution. Shall we through all our lists out of the window and marry the next guy / girl we meet? No, certainly not. Who said so. The solution lies in observing the selection process of MBA schools (I am not joking). The process is similar though the set of qualities and the outcome expected are different. Watch how they have differential weightages of different qualities and look at the person as a whole rather than individual qualities. We can also do so. Now, we also need to be objective while giving weightages to qualities. So for example, I see youngsters give highest priority to external beauty and most of them justify their thought process. I have different point of view on this aspect. The perception of beauty changes over time (and actually, so do the physical attributes). Once you are in relation we somebody, that person will look beautiful to you (I am not even talking about internal beauty). And if you are going to get tied to a girl / boy for life...internal beauty will matter more after two years (as my parents say it). So just make sure the person is internally beautiful. Even if you have to compromise on external beauty for that, its acceptable. Remember that the best aunt, uncle that you have, are not the best because they are most beautiful but because they are good at heart.

So if you assign such differential weightages to various qualities a person objectively and evaluate them on these, you might still not end up with Mr. Perfect (or miss perfect) but we will certainly get a good match (as we say in statistics). Also remember, your parents are also not perfect but still they are the best because you believe they are best. So will be your partner, if you believe in him / her. Half of the qualities which you are looking for, can be developed in a person over time and believe me, he or she will try her level best to develop these if you give him / her your best. :)

P.S.: Those who have boyfriends / girlfriends, don't even think to use this differential scoring of qualities otherwise you will be having a tough time (if your partner comes to know of it) :P