by Hasan Goreja

Created on: September 12, 2008

A famous saying goes: "Love is nothing but a misunderstanding between two fools" and so it be. This is the age of marketing and commercialization and we are being carried away by the notion of "Seeing is believing". You pick up any regular Mollywood (Film industry of India) flick and the whole movie revolves around a lad and a lass. No matter what the theme of the movie is, it always end with a young couple being married away, of course after falling in love and singing songs on the roads.

The idea of loving and marrying still seems to be the part and parcel of each other in modern India, albeit different in rest of the globe. And while moving towards the lesser-privileged-clan, living in the outskirts of the city or even in villages, the idea of love usually starts after marriage. In some parts, loving someone before walking the aisle is considered a grave sin thus punished harshly. So loving without marriage still seems to be a far cry in modern India.

In the stereotypic culture of India, still decades are required to ward off the notion of arranged, even forced marriages. Marrying a 17-year-old girl to a 48-year-old is not a thing to frown upon in the rural and far-flung areas of the Biggest Democracy of the World. Girls are not even asked to consent over the proposal because they are considered to be specie meant to serve the male gender. How can you expect a girl, still in her teens and fancying the boy who will come to wed her off, to love a man her father's age? To be or not to be, this is the question.

Coming to the metropolis, the universities are acting as a breeding ground for interaction and harmony between both the genders. They understand each other and are also aware of the requirements to survive in a growing society. Their parents are from well-educated backgrounds and are adjusting enough to support the emotional changes their son/daughter is going through. Such kids, when they grow up, do not fall in love instantly at the first glance owing to the huge exposure they are encountered with in their educational institutes and work places.

Also, in India, the girl is taught how to keep her hubby happy and in love. To add insult to the injury, sometimes, the girl is not even allowed to meet the boy with whom she is about to get married away. How can a couple grow love over night or, say, after a fort-night of their marriage? The answer is simple: The feeling which is injected in her that she is on the serving side and is meant to provide comfort to her husband as well as her in-laws. So she does her duty well as a soldier deployed on a post asked to obey his senior officer.

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