I am not the wolf, I promise! I definitely prefer being called the hunter in the story. Actually, the hunt for my own Ms Red Riding Hood has been quite entertaining. After so many serious posts about the upcoming marriage, I thought we all could do with some entertainment. By the way, I know that some of you previous "prospects" still read this blog. Honey, if you are going to be offended that I shared this about you, you can at least laugh at the other ones! Yes of course you know my email address (possibly my phone number as well)... but no, please don't feel free to tell me anything about this post except in the comments section here. :P
Our journey in search of Red Riding Hood begins with a wedding in the caves of France about five thousand years ago. You can see the wedding album on some of the walls even today. Now since one marriage is supposed to last you till seven rebirths, I think this might be the last of the seven for both of us. After this, we meet in heaven. Well, at least she gets in by default: I get in on the dependent visa. :) But we are digressing. Lets get back to the first person I was meeting on the "arranged" agenda. We were supposed to meet during my sister's wedding. Her family was slipped in as one of the guests, and the idea was that the two of us were to meet and greet each other under the cover of the wedding itself. Of course, every one who was "in" on the scoop watched both of us with twinkling eyes, hoping to catch some sparks here and there. Little smirks whenever they would pass me, inquiries from time to time. So, you ask, how did it go? Well, I cried at the end of the wedding. And no I am not going to clarify that.
The fun of course started when I came back to the university after the wedding. I told this story to quite a few people, including most of the details. Naturally, nobody believed me. To make sure that things remained anonymous, I fuzzed just the detail of where she lived: alternating between Chennai and Darjeeling. Given my reputation, this story remained completely unbelievable and imaginary. :D
Soon afterwards, the unbelievable started happening! Let alone one, more than two or three girls were interested in me at the same time! For the first time in my life, I felt like a complete hunk in demand ;) And then of course I perfected the technique of dumping girlfriends. I also learned a few priceless lessons as to what not to say to girls. For example, when discussing the topic of arranged marriage with one girl, when the question came up about if not her then someone else, I happened to mention, "Yeah I will need two weeks to forget about you and then look for someone else". Yeah yeah... the next two weeks weren't so comical :D Moral of the story that I learned: tell 'em you will need at least 6 months to get over her.
And seriously, what is it with girls and talking? All kinds of praises about her best friend, the scoop about her neighborhood aunty, the family tree of her extended family, ufff! In the midst of all this, I happened to mention that I play shadow cricket while on the phone with her. As soon as she learned about this, I had to answer a surprise quiz about the names of her immediate relatives. No, honey, I do pay attention - just that I can play cricket and talk at the same time. So much for being dead honest. :| Speaking of which, for you "will not do this" will mean "will absolutely not never ever do it". For her, any rule is subject to a veto otherwise known as the giggle. "Hehehe" and the rule doesn't apply to her any more. Suddenly the song "Ladki kyon" from Hum Tum began to make sense. A little confession, though... zis we like! :P
And guys, I know most girls tend to meet the weirdos of our kind and thereafter write loooong posts about them on their blogs. So in our defence, I can tell about my share of weirdos too. One of them professed at the end of our first phone call, "You know, I find it most natural to talk in English.. Bangla simply doesn't cut it". One other lady kept inquiring all along if I had much knowledge of animal husbandry (Dont' ask me why). :D And my favourite one - this lady who fell in lauuu with me within five phone calls. Yeah: same one who I happened to tell that it'll take me 2 weeks to forget about her. :D
Oh Ms Red Riding Hood... the amount of hoops I have had to jump through to get to you....
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Friday, February 12, 2010
The ideal woman
When I was a kid, one of my uncles was visiting India in search of a wife (yeah... the arranged marriages in those days). He visited quite a few homes and met some girls along with their families. I did not go along with them at any time, of course, but one day when he came back, I heard my mother and he discussing their day. The girl had asked him, "So, what is your idea of the ideal woman?". I don't remember what his answer was at that time, but the question certainly stirred me. When I set out to find the One for me, I needed to know what exactly I wanted in the person I would marry. Would I even want to marry the perfect woman? How do I make a list of things which I want to see in a potential wife? What is the final signal that seals the deal? Lots of questions, I know... but I arrived at some answers which I wish to share here.
The first thing I noticed when I pondered over the question was that I had a much better idea of what I did not want in a spouse rather than what I wanted in her. I did not want a loudmouth. I did not want a control freak I could handle one or two failed relationships from before, but not a series of ex boyfriends. I was also going to be a utilitarian in terms of choice. Which basically meant that if it came down to two people in the end who are otherwise very similar in terms of education, mental compatibility, chemistry with me, I would prefer someone from a less disparate social background, say a Bengali over a Mallu. Now this by no means is the same as saying I wouldn't marry a Punjabi... I was in fact looking at profiles from all over the place. I believe that ff things click properly with somebody then the minor difference of the cultures would eventually dissolve away. But as it turns out, I am marrying a Bengali.
Now there are two interesting things about finding the perfect woman. First of all, there is no such thing as a globally or universally perfect woman. Or to put it another way, if the definition of a unanimously perfect woman means someone exceedingly brilliant, compassionate, loving, etc. then I did not want to marry her. This is simply because I could not afford her with my own "mate budget". The other thing I believe in is that there are hundreds of girls out there who would make the perfect life partner for you. Let me explain this: if you randomly choose 1000 people of the opposite sex from an equal social upbringing and cultural family values as yours, you will find at least five people who are perfect fits for you. As I have argued before on my blog, that is the precise reason college relationships or boyfriend-in-the-next-building relationships bloom. My idea was to cast a net wide enough, talk to some, mingle with fewer, like one and grow fond of her, and then go with the final gut feeling.
Some of my friends had a few checklists for themselves about what they wanted in a girl. Sample one here (I don't know him personally... just found the blog link once). My objection to a list like that is that it essentially reduces marriage to a job, and the process of courtship to a job interview. I wasn't going to a market to buy vegetables and objectively looking at the color of leaves on the cabbage. I wasn't going to be the supervisor of the person I marry: she'll be my equal. So yes of course the 5/1000 example I gave before was true: I would happily spend my life with any of them. But the chemistry does not happen with all. So the task was to figure out who I click with the best, since I wanted to savour the courtship period as much as the actual marriage.
Finally, what did I want in the person? Simply put: a sharing of fundamental beliefs, of right and wrong, even if the reasons might not be articulable all the time. That assurance of mental compatibility is a key ingredient in building trust. Because then you don't have to watch over the other one or be suspicious. Given what you have seen before, you can reasonably assume that she is doing exactly what you would want her to do in a given situation. Beyond that it doesn't matter so much. I might be a sceptical agnostic and she might be a firm believer in God, but that isn't the fundamental belief. The fundamental principle is that one must respect another's right to his/her own views and so even though we might disagree on whether God exists, she wouldn't go out and taunt me at every opportunity that I'm going to hell for not believing.
So whether it comes to judiciously spending money or prioritizing which family gathering to attend, as long as both of us keep an open mind and have similar inclinations even before we discuss this rationally, it should be good. Finally, you may ask, how do I find all this out? Your experience of the world will tell. You know far more than what you think. We all have interacted with thousands of people all our lives, and easily know who to make friends with and who not to. Extend that a little more, and you will start having an idea of the person who you talk to or meet. Also, this is not an overnight process. Talking to someone and finding out what they are like takes a long time... I definitely had this in mind when I started. And the experiences while doing this were very "educational", to say the least. Next time about those. :)
The first thing I noticed when I pondered over the question was that I had a much better idea of what I did not want in a spouse rather than what I wanted in her. I did not want a loudmouth. I did not want a control freak I could handle one or two failed relationships from before, but not a series of ex boyfriends. I was also going to be a utilitarian in terms of choice. Which basically meant that if it came down to two people in the end who are otherwise very similar in terms of education, mental compatibility, chemistry with me, I would prefer someone from a less disparate social background, say a Bengali over a Mallu. Now this by no means is the same as saying I wouldn't marry a Punjabi... I was in fact looking at profiles from all over the place. I believe that ff things click properly with somebody then the minor difference of the cultures would eventually dissolve away. But as it turns out, I am marrying a Bengali.
Now there are two interesting things about finding the perfect woman. First of all, there is no such thing as a globally or universally perfect woman. Or to put it another way, if the definition of a unanimously perfect woman means someone exceedingly brilliant, compassionate, loving, etc. then I did not want to marry her. This is simply because I could not afford her with my own "mate budget". The other thing I believe in is that there are hundreds of girls out there who would make the perfect life partner for you. Let me explain this: if you randomly choose 1000 people of the opposite sex from an equal social upbringing and cultural family values as yours, you will find at least five people who are perfect fits for you. As I have argued before on my blog, that is the precise reason college relationships or boyfriend-in-the-next-building relationships bloom. My idea was to cast a net wide enough, talk to some, mingle with fewer, like one and grow fond of her, and then go with the final gut feeling.
Some of my friends had a few checklists for themselves about what they wanted in a girl. Sample one here (I don't know him personally... just found the blog link once). My objection to a list like that is that it essentially reduces marriage to a job, and the process of courtship to a job interview. I wasn't going to a market to buy vegetables and objectively looking at the color of leaves on the cabbage. I wasn't going to be the supervisor of the person I marry: she'll be my equal. So yes of course the 5/1000 example I gave before was true: I would happily spend my life with any of them. But the chemistry does not happen with all. So the task was to figure out who I click with the best, since I wanted to savour the courtship period as much as the actual marriage.
Finally, what did I want in the person? Simply put: a sharing of fundamental beliefs, of right and wrong, even if the reasons might not be articulable all the time. That assurance of mental compatibility is a key ingredient in building trust. Because then you don't have to watch over the other one or be suspicious. Given what you have seen before, you can reasonably assume that she is doing exactly what you would want her to do in a given situation. Beyond that it doesn't matter so much. I might be a sceptical agnostic and she might be a firm believer in God, but that isn't the fundamental belief. The fundamental principle is that one must respect another's right to his/her own views and so even though we might disagree on whether God exists, she wouldn't go out and taunt me at every opportunity that I'm going to hell for not believing.
So whether it comes to judiciously spending money or prioritizing which family gathering to attend, as long as both of us keep an open mind and have similar inclinations even before we discuss this rationally, it should be good. Finally, you may ask, how do I find all this out? Your experience of the world will tell. You know far more than what you think. We all have interacted with thousands of people all our lives, and easily know who to make friends with and who not to. Extend that a little more, and you will start having an idea of the person who you talk to or meet. Also, this is not an overnight process. Talking to someone and finding out what they are like takes a long time... I definitely had this in mind when I started. And the experiences while doing this were very "educational", to say the least. Next time about those. :)
Thursday, February 04, 2010
The Punishment (part I)
The story below is the first of a three-part translation of a short story by Rabindranath Tagore, called "Shasti", which means 'punishment'. And as even embark upon this project, I find the English language simply too impoverished to capture the magic he weaved through his Bengali. But, here is my feeble attempt nonetheless, using a thousand consultations of the thesaurus. Read on.
===================
When the brothers Dukhiram and Chhidaam Rui started from their household that morning for their daily wage work, sickle in hand, their wives were already shouting and screaming at each other. But like so many other noises in nature, their neighbourhood had gotten used to this daily clamour. Whenever one of the shrill voices would begin to echo around the locality, people would roll their heads at one another and remark, "Here we go again"; meaning things are going exactly as one would expect them to: nothing exceptional today. The way no-one ever asks questions when the Sun rises in the East, a quarrel between the housewives of the Kuri (Rui) household never evoked any surprise or questions. Nobody ever needed to know a reason as to why they were fighting.
Of course this unending fracas touched their husbands a lot more than their neighbours, but it never bothered them so much. It seemed as if the two brothers were traversing their journey of life on a cart, and the ceaseless ruckus of two rusty wheels on either side had become an inescapable part of the voyage that they just had to live with.
Actually, on the days when there was no brawl, the iron curtain of silence reeked of impending doom in the household: nobody could ever presage what was about to happen on that day.
The day the events in our story begin, the two brothers returned home from work to find a house repressed with a potent thunder.
And the day was stuffy outside as well. It had rained scantily that afternoon, and the sky was still cloudy. The humid feeling of the dusk hung around noiselessly in the stagnant motionless air. The heavy shrubbery and boscage around the place had grown tall this rainy season. And the dank smell of bamboo soaked in the stale water from the surrounding blackish fields stood around them like an endless wall in dull sublimity. There were frogs croaking in the fetid puddles in cow dung from the back barn, and an endless chatter of crickets had rendered the evening distressed in a discordant chaos.
The grand Padma river nearby had taken on an unnerving potent quiescence at this time. Past the furrows in the rice paddies, the river had crawled up to the courtyards of many outlying households. Even the roots of some of the sturdy mango and jack-fruit trees had been bared, as if their knuckled hopeless fingers were clenching on to whatever last refuge they could grab.
Dukhiram and Chhidaam had gone to labour at the local zamindar's office that day. The vast paddy fields on the other side of the river were ripe by this time: the rice had to be harvested before the river eroded away the land. For most poor folk in the countryside, this was the season when they would either work on their own fields or go to work at someone else's fields and get paid in return. Everyone around the brothers' house had gone to earn money that day. Except for these two. They were drafted into service at the zamindar's house by force when the sepoys showed up that morning and forced them to tag along. They spent their day fixing the thatched roof of the zamindar's office where it was leaking at places, and putting up some other bamboo huts. They couldn't come home for lunch, and were given some trifling snacks once in the day. They spent most of the day getting drenched in the sluggish rain, were paid a pittance which was far too little compared to what they would've earned in the field. And to make up for that, the kind of unpleasantries they had had to put up with during the day amounted to far more than their daily share.
After trudging through the mud and chilling water when the brothers returned home in the evening, they found the younger wife Chandara lying silently on her saree on one side of the courtyard. Like the cloudy day today, she had spent most of her afternoon shedding tears and had finally given up and quieted down into a morose silence at dusk. The elder one, Radha, also sat on the steps with a sulking face. Her one-and-half-year old son was weeping and when the two brothers came back home, he was lying naked at a corner of the courtyard, fast asleep from his own exhaustions.
The famished Dukhiram didn't waste a moment before ordering his wife, "Give me food".
This set the spark in the elder sister's powder keg. She leaped up and shouted piercing the evening air, "And where do I get the food from, huh? Did you give me rice before you left home? And how do I get the rice, do I also earn something?"
After the damning exhaustions of the whole day, amidst the dark gloomy evening and with the raging hunger inside him, the raucous words of his wife and especially the sly reference in the last question snapped something inside Dukhiram. He simply couldn't take it any more. He picked up the sickle at hand, stood up and bellowed like a wounded bull, "What did you just say?". Saying thus, he struck on his wife's head with its handle. Radha collapsed near her sister-in-law's feet and died almost instantly.
Chandara jumped from the spot with her blood-soaked clothes and shrieked "Oh my God!" while Chhidam quickly tried to clasp her mouth and muffle the scream. Dukhiram went numb, dropped his sickle and sat down on the courtyard in a halfwitted stupor. The little boy woke up and started wailing in some dark fear.
The evening outside was perfectly silent at this time. The shepherds were returning home with their cattle after the dusk. Those who had gone to the other side of the river for help in the fields were returning home content after a good day's work and sacks full of rice as their reward. Inside, the remaining family sat in silent despair.
===================
When the brothers Dukhiram and Chhidaam Rui started from their household that morning for their daily wage work, sickle in hand, their wives were already shouting and screaming at each other. But like so many other noises in nature, their neighbourhood had gotten used to this daily clamour. Whenever one of the shrill voices would begin to echo around the locality, people would roll their heads at one another and remark, "Here we go again"; meaning things are going exactly as one would expect them to: nothing exceptional today. The way no-one ever asks questions when the Sun rises in the East, a quarrel between the housewives of the Kuri (Rui) household never evoked any surprise or questions. Nobody ever needed to know a reason as to why they were fighting.
Of course this unending fracas touched their husbands a lot more than their neighbours, but it never bothered them so much. It seemed as if the two brothers were traversing their journey of life on a cart, and the ceaseless ruckus of two rusty wheels on either side had become an inescapable part of the voyage that they just had to live with.
Actually, on the days when there was no brawl, the iron curtain of silence reeked of impending doom in the household: nobody could ever presage what was about to happen on that day.
The day the events in our story begin, the two brothers returned home from work to find a house repressed with a potent thunder.
And the day was stuffy outside as well. It had rained scantily that afternoon, and the sky was still cloudy. The humid feeling of the dusk hung around noiselessly in the stagnant motionless air. The heavy shrubbery and boscage around the place had grown tall this rainy season. And the dank smell of bamboo soaked in the stale water from the surrounding blackish fields stood around them like an endless wall in dull sublimity. There were frogs croaking in the fetid puddles in cow dung from the back barn, and an endless chatter of crickets had rendered the evening distressed in a discordant chaos.
The grand Padma river nearby had taken on an unnerving potent quiescence at this time. Past the furrows in the rice paddies, the river had crawled up to the courtyards of many outlying households. Even the roots of some of the sturdy mango and jack-fruit trees had been bared, as if their knuckled hopeless fingers were clenching on to whatever last refuge they could grab.
Dukhiram and Chhidaam had gone to labour at the local zamindar's office that day. The vast paddy fields on the other side of the river were ripe by this time: the rice had to be harvested before the river eroded away the land. For most poor folk in the countryside, this was the season when they would either work on their own fields or go to work at someone else's fields and get paid in return. Everyone around the brothers' house had gone to earn money that day. Except for these two. They were drafted into service at the zamindar's house by force when the sepoys showed up that morning and forced them to tag along. They spent their day fixing the thatched roof of the zamindar's office where it was leaking at places, and putting up some other bamboo huts. They couldn't come home for lunch, and were given some trifling snacks once in the day. They spent most of the day getting drenched in the sluggish rain, were paid a pittance which was far too little compared to what they would've earned in the field. And to make up for that, the kind of unpleasantries they had had to put up with during the day amounted to far more than their daily share.
After trudging through the mud and chilling water when the brothers returned home in the evening, they found the younger wife Chandara lying silently on her saree on one side of the courtyard. Like the cloudy day today, she had spent most of her afternoon shedding tears and had finally given up and quieted down into a morose silence at dusk. The elder one, Radha, also sat on the steps with a sulking face. Her one-and-half-year old son was weeping and when the two brothers came back home, he was lying naked at a corner of the courtyard, fast asleep from his own exhaustions.
The famished Dukhiram didn't waste a moment before ordering his wife, "Give me food".
This set the spark in the elder sister's powder keg. She leaped up and shouted piercing the evening air, "And where do I get the food from, huh? Did you give me rice before you left home? And how do I get the rice, do I also earn something?"
After the damning exhaustions of the whole day, amidst the dark gloomy evening and with the raging hunger inside him, the raucous words of his wife and especially the sly reference in the last question snapped something inside Dukhiram. He simply couldn't take it any more. He picked up the sickle at hand, stood up and bellowed like a wounded bull, "What did you just say?". Saying thus, he struck on his wife's head with its handle. Radha collapsed near her sister-in-law's feet and died almost instantly.
Chandara jumped from the spot with her blood-soaked clothes and shrieked "Oh my God!" while Chhidam quickly tried to clasp her mouth and muffle the scream. Dukhiram went numb, dropped his sickle and sat down on the courtyard in a halfwitted stupor. The little boy woke up and started wailing in some dark fear.
The evening outside was perfectly silent at this time. The shepherds were returning home with their cattle after the dusk. Those who had gone to the other side of the river for help in the fields were returning home content after a good day's work and sacks full of rice as their reward. Inside, the remaining family sat in silent despair.
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