Way back in 1987 I was sitting in a tourist bus travelling to Jaipur from Delhi. We were a group of cousins on a trip north. Sitting next to me was a fifty-plus American lady touring India and we got talking.
She asked me whether I was married and I said yes, pointing to my wife sitting in the next row. “Oh she is pretty! Where did you meet her?” she asked. I said, “At the girl-seeing ceremony,” and explained to her how it happens. She was baffled and asked, “You surely would have got to know each other well before the wedding?” I said, “We met just one more time for 15 minutes along with her relatives.” Her eyes widened even more when she said, “How can you? What about the chemistry between you?”
“Well, in India we develop our own chemistry in due course, I guess,” I said. She was lost for words! Next she asked, “Are you going to have children?” I said, “In India no one asks that question. Having kids after marriage is a given and if you don’t produce one within a reasonable time you will be questioned by all and sundry and further bombarded with tips and advice as to how to produce one!” I added that not having a child could be a stigma, especially to the wife who will be branded as ‘barren’. After hearing all this her eyes almost popped out!
A while later she was talking about her daughter who was working in another city. “She has started living with her boyfriend and last time she visited me she said they were planning to get married.
But I told her ‘Oh don’t hurry into marriage; live with him for another six months and then decide whether you really want to marry him!’”
At that, my eyes popped out!
Well, today in 2017, I wouldn’t be surprised if an Indian mother said the same things about marriage! How far have we moved in just one generation? No one is anymore surprised by someone not opting to marry, and couples not wanting to have children. The present generation makes its own choices, whether they are right or wrong!
Don’t some ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ keep interchanging depending on the time, place, race, class, culture and so on?
cbe_nr@yahoo.co.in