Arranged Vs Love

For me it has been nothing short of a movie experience, falling in love. As a teenager itself I greatly doubted the idea of an arranged marriage. I couldn’t reason with the idea of judging a person by certain external factors and later commit to the one I think would make a great companion after just talking to him less than an hour or so. I don’t know how my sis did it or my parents. May be they just took the plunge trusting God that it would all be made well.

Somehow I couldn’t take that plunge.  Not that I do not have faith in God. But I believe God will do his part, when we do our part. My intuition was not to stand around and just go with the flow.  I had a stirring feeling that I must know the person I get married to beforehand. In a country like India the term dating or even to an extend having boyfriend girl friend is considered taboo.  I could be wrong and things might be a little better than what it sounds like. Anyhow for my family and the community I belonged, it was viewed as if we have done something wrong. But I was never so concerned what others thought as long as I felt my conscience is right. So I always told my mom, I will have a love marriage. Mother always replied me like this-if the proposal is from a Good family, then no worries we will support you to get married.

During school and graduation I was not interested for a relationship for I felt, it was not the time for love, but the time to build friendships, make lots of fun memories and gather knowledge. It was during my final year of PGDBM, I would tell myself, God, I think my turn is coming next for marriage, but I cannot do an arranged marriage. I absolutely hate to be treated like a puppet. I refuse to be treated like objects were people quote price for me, my education and for my family wealth or culture or whatever.  I cannot dress up and stand in front of strangers whose complete attention would be on me. I felt like running away, whenever I thought about arranged marriage and it’s never ending nonsensical traditions.

I had some expectations about marriage and my future partner in life. I have heard some people asking what sort of a person one want to marry based on his profession. Isn’t that stupid? Does it really matter whether your husband is a business man or a professor??? Yes it would matter for those who want to marry for money and high income life style, but not me. Not that I would have married someone off the street because that’s beyond stupidity. I had a realistic expectation about whom or what sort of person I wanted to marry .I knew that almost no one in my family would agree on these facts.

There were 3 things I had in my mind. A Person who will love me beyond my mistakes and faults, a person who shares a same life style as mine and a person who will support my dreams and aspirations. I cannot change the person who I am but I can accommodate others into my life without changing who I really am. I knew exactly the kind of person I am. Self-knowledge is more important than any other knowledge. Finding the right partner for myself, I understood that I must first know myself then only I can understand another person.

Traditionally in my family, when you get a proposal there are few matters of discussion. First what is the girl’s or guy’s qualification? Second, where’s she/he working and how much does she/he get paid? For a girl the career question would start a little different. Is the girl working or not? Then they want to know about the siblings, the parents, who all are working and where, the family history etc. Not saying these things are bad thing, it is good if you are from a known family or if you belong to a family that has high education or belong to a class apart whatever. But these are secondary issues for me.

Forget about when you get a proposal. Before that you advertise yourself for a life companion which sounds so weird for me. We do not advertise to make friends or family. Then why advertise for marriage? And the matter of ad is embarrassing. You introduce yourself with your complexion, spirituality, education, job, family or religious background etc. Lord, I cannot imagine myself being in one of those ads and all thanks to God that I didn’t have to. My intention is not to insult or degrade anyone who have had or planning to have an arranged marriage. I am not saying arranged marriage is wrong or love marriage is right. I am only telling what’s been best for me.

Though I have had a love marriage; I married with everybody’s consent and blessings. I am totally against people who want to or think of eloping. It was tough to convince everybody in my family to agree for my marriage, but finally it happened. Love is not blind as the saying goes. I would say Love should not be blind if you ask me. Love should be realistic and practical; thinking of the welfare of all involved in.  

Never abandon your loved ones. In our Indian society marriage is not among just 2 individuals it happens between two families. We need to keep that in mind. There have been times when I and husband almost felt defeated trying to convince my family. But not even once we discussed about getting married secretly or eloping etc. because that is not what we wanted. Both of us couldn’t do that to our families. They are the people who raised us and they have loved us since the day we were born to this day and how can we ever abandon their love for somebody else’s love.

Yes, I admit I might have hurt my mother’s feelings, my sister’s feelings and the rest of my family member’s feelings to some extend when I wanted to marry the person of my choice and not theirs. Not that their choice was not good enough. My priorities in life were different from theirs, there for our choices differed too. I believe self-knowledge is the best knowledge in the world and if you know yourself well, you can also know what you want in life too better than anybody.

And today everyone who said anything negative about my husband before my marriage has only good things to say about him and his family. I knew this day would come. Even when he got upset how poorly people misjudged him and his family without getting to know them; I assured him that; a day would come were on everybody’s tongue they will have only praises for you and your family. Everybody in my family had concerns, some doubted whether I would be able to adjust with him and his family. Some felt he is not good enough for me. I knew what I would be gaining and what I would be missing out on by getting married to him. I have gained a loving family. That’s something really important and a blessing.

Whether arranged or love, according to me one must try to get to know each other in the given circumstances. That’s what’s important. Above all one need to marry the person for love and not for any of the ideas mentioned in a matrimonial ad. The kind of love that brings perfection to your life!

I am not typical.

Something I have always claimed is that I am not a typical malayalee or mallu as popularly known us. I hate that word actually ’MALLU’ I don’t know about others, but for me it sounds more negative than positive so I will not be using that word here after.

But each time I have commented on somebody as a typical malayalee, my hubby smiles sarcastically asking me who the hell am I then? Here I am not stressing the word malayalee, rather the word typical. I have not or ever will deny that I am a Keralite and I am proud of my state but not so proud of the people. Of course we malaylees are blessed with a number of things and have reasons to be proud of ourselves compared to many other states of our Nation. There is a joke that any country we go, there will be at least one malayalee there. Compared to many states, we are much educated, we have schools and colleges all over the state, people have a higher standard of living, there’s not any discrimination in the name of class, creed, religion etc. But we have failed to provide jobs for the highly educated and talented people. We have failed to instill in our young citizens of tomorrow moral values and spirituality. We have been so keen on making our kids smart, intelligent and bright; we forgot them to teach humanity. We don’t open our economy for trade and setting up large scale business for of course some valid reason like environmental pollution etc., but a lot more for no reasons. Now we are suffering the consequences.  We taught only doing white collar jobs are decent, so today we have no blue collar workers in our society and we are paying the price of it. No one is financially poor in our state anymore, but spiritually a lot more are poorer than ever. Well these are areas we need improvement.  We claim that we are much civilized and cultured and feel really proud of our culture, but the vulgarities in our culture that’s what I am talking about in this article.

I hate type casting people. It might look like to you that I myself am stereotyping people by calling others typical malayalee. But I am not. I just want them to see why I call them so. I’ll explain in this article what typical malayalee means to me.  

Some months back I was talking to one of my friends about a proposal that came to her and she told me that in a discussion with one of her close friends she told him that he found the guy a typical malayalee. Then her friend told what do you mean by he is a typical malayalee, for all you know may be you too fit in that typical malayalee section. Well I do not want to comment on that particular discussion.

  I guess what I keep saying of a typical malayalee is someone who has an average thinking; someone who doesn’t have the openness to accept other culture, people who are different from him; someone who thinks less of woman, someone who spends more time in finding fault with others than himself and the characteristics goes on and on.

 Let me further explain my above statements. I see regularly people commenting about Santosh Pandit, Ranjini Haridas, Prithviraj, all made famous or infamous by our own community. When Santosh Pandit came out with his silly film, why people had to abuse him so much? Not only that what he has made is up to any standards but also was just plain stupidity and dumb. I am not defending Santosh Pandit, but I cannot understand these people who wouldn’t stop abusing him. Now what does that tell about our culture and standard? They cheer and bad mouth the same person at their will. 

Ranjini Haridas is another person people love to hate. As a comparer I acknowledge that she has done wonders for the Malayalam television and has raised the standard.  I am glad someone among us has come up to make every one of us proud in world stages with her presence.  But like anyone else, me and you she too has her flaws. I personally feel that she needs to brush up her body language while on stage and she lacks the Malayalam slang that is working against her. But she is trying and we can see that.  Other than that I don’t see anything in her to bash her up like everybody else we see on Facebook and in other platforms.  Prithviraj made the mistake of praising himself in front of thousands of people by saying he can speak far better English than anyone else in the Malayalam film fraternity. I don’t agree with his statement. But the question is why were people so hung upon that one statement of him throughout a year. In this world and especially in the world of cinema controversies are born every second and people talk about it for a while and move on to the next, what was so controversial in Prithviraj’s statement that people keep bashing him for an entire year? I don’t have answers to these questions.

My questions don’t end here. I don’t know why this so called typical malayalee think poorly or more like terrible about those who cannot speak Malayalam.  I have cousins born and brought up in north India and they can speak only broken Malayalam. I know why the family settled in Coimbatore than in Kerala. I have seen them experiencing that isolated treatment from others whenever they came to visit us in Kerala. The first question many of our relatives used to ask them is “Malayalam ariyathilla alley?” meaning oh...so you don’t know Malayalam, right? Now why do they have to do that?  Such question would pull anybody’s esteem down and make them feel bad.  Don’t people have the minimum common sense? Imagine if you and every other malayalee who lives in Kerala was not born in Kerala and brought up in some other part of our country where everyone speaks some other language; can we be expected to speak fluent Malayalam? We must remember we will be judged by the same measure as we judge others and that’s exactly why people from the north keeping quizzing us why people in Kerala can’t speak Hindi fluently even after Hindi being the national language. Same situation, we don’t use Hindi much, because we don’t have to. We can run our lives speaking only Malayalam. It doesn’t end here, typical malayalees also hate those who are malaylees and who knows Malayalam choose to speak in English or any other language. Now why is that? Personally I have experienced this discrimination. I agree that there might be people who want to show off, their accent or their language skill. But not everybody has the same intention. But what these typical malaylees forget is that English is a language that’s used universally and we all use it in our daily lives. It has become a must in the global world. Then why treat people who speak the language so badly?

The typical malayalees are so keen in making fun of people who wear anything other than traditional clothes. Fine influence is there in many movies and classical comedy shows that come on television.  I agree there are popes who reveal a little too much, but the moment a girl wearing jeans walks in the mood of people get shifted. May be things have changed a lot, but I am talking about the so called typical malayalees alone and they still exist. Men and women alike form part of this group. I studied in a girls only school for more than 8 years and it was considered taboo to wear modern outfits. The teachers had really bad impression about students who are from NRI families because of several above mentioned reasons. They too were isolated for not speaking good Malayalam, for speaking English, for dressing in modern outfits etc. The typical malaylees basically despises anyone and everyone who is different from him. They are not able to accept and more over enjoy other people’s difference.

 People don’t know how to respect another individual’s personal space. I will give you a fine example. Once you finish your college people will start with the question, where are you working? If you are already employed, they will start with are you married? If married they will start with the question how many kids? If you already have kid, then why just one Oh…God were do these people get off? My father passed away 11 years back since then the people living in and around our home are more curious to know from where we are earning, how much wealth we have, how bad is our health etc. etc. They have no shame and they ask straight to your face as if asking how you doing.  Many times people have asked how do we run our expenses, who pays for us? I mean what sort of an insulting question is that? It is true what my brother in law says. When something tragic happens in our lives, it is our own relatives who keep us depressed by asking about it every now and then.

The typical malayalees can either be narrow minded or acts so open minded he makes a fool of himself. The narrow minded ones mostly don’t have much exposure about the world outside his hometown. The other one lived abroad and comes back to make a fool of him by spending lavishly on unnecessary stuff and shows off. More specifically that’s a typical foreign returned malayalee. A good laugh of the typical NRI malayalee has been portrayed in a television series called “AKKARA KAZHCHAKAL”.  But that’s just for laughs, in real life it can be a pain.

The typical mallu feels earning a 6 digit salary, and owning 2 large bungalows and 3 or 4 cars and some estates and when getting married the girl should come with a heavy dowry mostly gold can make him happy, but are they truly happy? It makes them only greedy and not happy.  The trend is to be salaried in an IT company or to be employed in a foreign country and have endless wealth. People who has shallow thoughts are typical for me whether malayalee or not.

Another peculiar characteristic of many malaylees regardless of whether they are typical or not are they have very high personal hygiene but very low social hygiene.  A malayalee might take bath 2 times a day, but he has no shame in throwing all the waste from his home on the public road. 

We need not turn into racists or shouldn’t be too proud of ourselves. From every culture we have something to learn, instead of bad mouthing people who are different from us, why not try to inhibit from them their good habits and ignore the bad ones.  All malaylees including the typical ones have the potential to change. I believe when we change the world around us we change.

Recently I listened to Oprah Winfrey who was on a visit to India and she said good and bad things about our country. We have no discipline and it’s a chaos out in the streets but under all that chaos there is calmness and people have no rage against each other and they have genuine respect for another human being. Religion is not just talk; people actually live that way here. We do exude these positive traits; then why can’t we get rid of the negatives as well.

 Let us be kinder, simpler in living, high in thinking, have more heart and less hate towards all. Let us not misuse our rights and freedom. Let us not remain a typical mallu neither in thoughts words or actions.

The Selfish I

Aren’t we all, at least most of all a lil too sucked up in our own lives worrying, dreaming even probably fantasizing and working hard thinking just about our own life alone? I am not saying we are all brutally selfish who just think about oneself. But aren’t we as individuals worry only about our family, career, friends etc. There’s a world out there filled with people and problems which are way bigger than ours and our worlds.  I wonder how less we do for absolute strangers who probably mean nothing to us or who is no way related us from whom we don’t expect anything in return.

I  used to go out of my way to help people, but it was always with a selfish motivation of friendship.  For the less fortunate or what you can call as the under privileged people in our world, how less we all do. It is not just money I am talking about. May be spend an hour with them, share your knowledge. Open a new world to them, there so much more we can do other than give away money. I always wanted to get involved in some charity work, but have done very less. Of course in terms of money we all give probably via church or school or through any other means. But in a long time I have not really participated in doing something real for those people. I really enjoy doing something for them. I miss those rare times in my life where some of our batch mates from college went to visit mentally challenged kids in an institution near our college. The kids were not only adorable but also really surprised me by the kind of questions they asked and from their care takers we also learnt that they are capable of doing handcraft works and they sell it at shops. Isn’t it truly amazing to have such experiences in life? We think we have something to offer to these people and they end up enlightening us.

Nobody does anything for anybody for free anymore. People think of cashing in on every opportunity they get.  Don’t we miss giving something in free rather than just enjoying only the things we get for free?  No shopping festival in the world is actually giving anyone anything for free and we all know it, yet we all go buy unnecessary things we don’t even need just because we like the idea of getting something for free. Imagine if we could really give something for free to someone without any obligation how wonderful we can make the other person feel. Forgive a debt, let go off an ill feeling, give more than what you take from this world. 

We will never have enough to give after fulfilling all our desires. So don’t postponed the things you want to give, just keep giving and may be you will get that back. But we shouldn’t be worrying about that. Our job is to do the best we can for others and leave the rest to God. I am not saying serving your parents, or raising your kids or helping your spouse isn’t good enough. Of course charity begins at home.  Let us all find more time, money, willingness and love to give for others who really need it.