Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Arranged marriage is highly flawed institution - 2

Recently I read the book "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" by John Gray. This book is a must read for every man and woman, who are or planning to be, in a relationship. This book highlights how poor our understanding is of opposite sex. Now this book is written by an American and as we know America is a very open society as compared to us when it comes to communication between men and women. Still American people have less understanding of opposite sex, you can imagine in what great abyss we Indian people are.
So , continuing from my last article, how arrange marriage promotes lack of interaction. We all want to interact with opposite sex but still we follow the restrictions of our society and elders. Why we do not revolt against this ? Its simple, because arrange marriage is easy way out. If we have to look for a good girl for ourselves it is hard work. Where you can't even interact with a women it is almost impossible. So we take the lollipop(arrange marriage) from our elders, simple. You may be the most unattractive man with most deriding opinion about women , still you can get the brightest and the prettiest woman for you if you are powerful, or have money or good job, by arrange marriage. For the women it is like sleeping with the enemy. Arranged marriage is highly tilted towards men, power and money(dowry). It is highly undemocratic because it kills our freedom to choose.
Arranged marriage is tool in the hands of our society to control younger people. Yes younger people should be controlled but by moral principles, and not at the cost of freedom. Parents want arranged marriage so that they have better control of the lives of their kids. But this controlling comes at the cost of happiness. Neither husband wife are happy with each other nor their parents are happy with them. It is not that parents want to do this for the welfare of their kids. If that is the case why they disown or even ready to kill their own kids when kids marry by their own choice. Sometimes people say I am doing arrange marriage by my own choice, but saying this is illogical. It is something like a women wearing Burqa saying that it is my choice, or Sachin Tendualkar saying that I wear helmet by my choice to face fast bowlers. Sunil Gavaskar made his choice and wore a cap and faced the most lethal pace attack of West-Indies bowlers. A choice means you have other options also.
There are other social issues promoted and protected by arranged marriage like dowry, castism, racism, regionalism, women discrimination, child abuse etc. We can not outrightly reject this institution because at present for most of the people this is the only way to get married. The first step towards removing this very bad institution is to stop men, women segregation. There should be no non co-education school. Men and women should be segregated only at places of extreme difficulties like local bus or Mumbai local train, otherwise not. I don't see these things happenning in near future. I finish this article by just saying one thing that I am sure, I'll not impose my rule over my child or any other child.