Thursday, October 22, 2009

Arranged marriage is highly flawed institution - 1

In our society interaction of young men and women is restricted. If I look back at my life, my interactions with women are very few and far apart and none of them were of the level where you develop an understanding with other person. I have always been to a non co-Education school. Then I did engineering that too in mechanical. Very few women go for engineering and none of them opts for mechanical. After that now I am working in IT industry but in mechanical domain where women to men ratio is normally 1:25 or worse. Sometimes I think am I living in a Islamic society like Iran, Iraq or Afghanistan, where women are separated from men. Frankly speaking our Indian society is a miniature version of Talibani society. We can see the manifestation of this in our movies. In Hindi movies a villain or sometime hero treats a woman badly and in South Indian movies all heroes treat women very badly. You will say , come on! you can talk to any woman in India. Yes I know that but there are practical problems because of our social structure, some of them I have mentioned above.
The worst consequence of all this is that, we treat women badly and we are never aware of that. Like we have seen the video of a Taliban man whipping a woman on her buttocks. That man treated the woman so badly but in his mind he was doing right thing. Its all about level of awareness. We condemn that act but we also do many wrong things to woman and think that we are doing right. Our level of awareness is not adequate and that is because of lack of interaction with women. Of course people who go to co-ed and have better environment where men women ratio is good , behave better with women. I have had interactions with such guys from the time of my engineering. Their understanding of women was far better than me. I was an absolute dumb when it came to women. My idea of dealing with woman was following the filmy heroes. Today i know that how bad this idea is to follow Indian filmy hero. It is like "Apne pair main Kulhadi marna". Today I am married for 3 years and with my understanding I can say that the better guys at the time of my engineering were also very poor when it come to women. The point I want to make here is that even if someone comes form a co-ed his understanding of women remains at a very low level because there are no(or very few) deep interactions among boys and girls. The reason for that is we are not allowed. If you are seen with a girl too much then questions will be raised. I think we are all aware of such practical problems. After 3 years of marriage and interactions with my wife I think I am much improved person to deal with a woman. I Imagine, how good I would have become if I would have interacted deeply with say 10 women. I am sure I would have been a much much better person. This not only makes you better to deal with women it makes you overall a better person. But now the tragedy is that half of the life is over and that too the better one. We have lost the joyous part of our life unaware. We can never get back the energy and enthusiasm of a 20 year old.
So finally I come to the main point of this article. In the societies like ours to interact deeply with a woman you have to marry. This is an absolutely absurd scenario but this is reality of our India. The first problem is that you do not get chance to interact with many women as you can marry only one woman legally. I don't want to marry 10 women but I certainly want to interact with hundreds of women. A marriage in which you are allowed to interact freely with your partner only after marriage is called "Arranged Marriage".
If you go around and ask people that do they like arranged marriage, majority answer will be positive. In my opinion this is "Absurd Marriage" as I have made my point above. Arranged marriage actually promotes lack of interaction. If there is free communication there will be no arrange marriage. This is just beginning I have lot of other stuff against this holy institution. I'll come up with that later. I'll first argue that how arranged marriage promotes lack of interaction between men and women. Any comments 'for or against' are welcome.