"The man lives with his parents. Then he goes into his family business; he can't do what he really wants to do. Then he has to get married to the girl his parents choose. There is no feeling. When he wants sex, he has relations with the same mood with his wife- as a bodily need. He discharges.When he finds a new girl, he has relations the same way. He might want to do something else, but he does not know how. The wife also, breeding children, cooking at home, does not know what life is outside."
"..there seems to be so much sexual unhappiness in the city. If all the other areas of a person's life are circumscribed, if the pattern has been established before they even have been born,then when it comes to sex it will be similarly conditioned,its positions and its techniques preordained or hastily improvised in the darkness."
-Suketu Mehta, Maximum city
When rendering images for computer graphics, we try very hard to create randomness. The more diverse the set of random numbers we generate, the more accurate is the final image. Life is about being open to randomness, and making the best of it. Arranged marriages are not about relishing the randomness of a relationship. They are about eliminating randomness.
The so called 'success' of arranged marriages is because marriage does not need love to 'succeed' ! Marriage could also be about security, a sense of a life goal achieved, without any love present-like Indian IT companies with their various ISO 9000 quality certifications which do not imply technical innovation.
In Tagore's 'Parting Song', the protagonist Amit Roy compares marriage to having a well in your house from which you could drink water at any time. Love on the other hand, he says, is like a vast ocean (but perhaps not so predictable, or controllable!)
In a few years this will become a non issue, this system will die out. But for my generation in their thirties, who faced two roads forking in the wood (with one path a bare trail with no map or precedent, unlike the omniscient teens or 20 somethings of today,for whom everything came so easily) it is a fight for one's individuality.
