The screwed up history of Indian relationships

Are you a Single Indian male? Do you feel life's been unfair to you? Do you ask yourself why you have ended up like this? 

Are you in a Relationship? Or is that what your girlfriend has led you to believe, and you don't know if you are better off for it or worse? Do you ask yourself if your Single friends actually have a reason to feel envious of you or should it be the other way round? Do you feel the relationship game in India is just too complex for you to play? Well join the club. Lets see, why its so?

Men are nothing but glorified beasts.  To understand how screwed up our relationships are, all it takes is to see how the animal kingdom deals with its mating game. Let’s accept, that's how nature had intended us to be. The fact that we didn’t turn up that way doesn’t change the fact that we were actually designed like most other animals.

               

In the animal world, relationships are pretty uncomplicated. A monkey, a horse or a lion grows up, attains puberty and starts looking for a mate. And good for them, they find accepting females, who don’t ask them to marry before agreeing to have their baby (Not just one, but rather a whole bunch of them). Whoever said that our women aren’t that demanding. I know half the readers are already cringing their noses at the animal comparison. You may say that, ‘of course we have evolved to be better than that’. The fact of the matter is that the complication of the mating game is actually the price we are paying for all the fruits of evolution. The grass is always greener on the side of the horse.

If indeed the game hadn’t got complicated enough by virtue of being born a human, if you also have the misfortune of being born in India, then it’s worse. While there are quite a few regions where still many men are living the animal way, in most other places they just don’t have a clue what to do.

The new relationship game in India is indeed pretty funny and strange. It aspires for international standards, but still is rooted in Indian ground realities. And the problem is, the players haven’t actually understood the rules of the game, or are having different assumptions about it.

When it comes to relationships, Indians carry a huge baggage – the baggage of their past. The way men and women got together in this country has been changing quite rapidly in the past few generations, and while people have been moving ahead, they still have a part of them tied down to the past. In the generation of our grandparents (this doesn’t apply to you, if you are already a grandparent while reading this), the relationship game was pretty simple. There used to be the boy and the girl. As soon as they came of age, or maybe even before, they were married off. So, as soon as the boy starts discovering his physical self, and his longings, he already has a wife at home to play around with. Good for you kid!! This practice, though crude and termed as unjust to the kids by the modern society, had two good results. Every kid in the block was always in a relationship, and every other kid knew this. Also, if we consider the fact that one got a mate even without trying and even before one could appreciate the need for it, and if they could only know the hardships of competing in the open field, then they would realise that it’s not that bad a state to be in after all.

So it does seem our grandparents had it pretty good back then. The next time you find an old lady telling you how she got married at the age of 15 itself, realise that she is actually throwing a taunt at you about how early she started her sex life, which you, a 21^st century junkie, still can’t openly have at the age of 25. So you know how much weight to attach to your grandparents’ words on chastity and self-control from now on. They just don’t know what they are talking about.

Now comes the generation of our parents. They had it a lot harder than the previous one. Suddenly the marriage ages increased, especially for the men. Women weren’t yet completely independent. Most households let them study till their schooling got over and maybe for a few more years of college, and then immediately married them off. The men on the other hand had to get a job, settle down in a few years and then marry a girl of their parents’ choice. Because of these extra years men spent to settle down, there was always an age difference between the men and women. This age difference has been the issue of a lot of propaganda, which varies from the one about how it lends stability during old age, to how women actually reach mental maturity quite early. All bullshit. What this age difference actually meant was that, as the women got married in the late teens and the men in the mid to late 20s, there were actually no women the men could socially see in this intermittent stage before marriage. For example, if you are a man of that time, you maybe having female classmates till school (even this is highly unlikely as most schools were segregated on sex), but after school, you hardly knew any girls of your age group, as all of them were married off. So unless you could pull off an extra-marital with the lady in your office (also quite dangerous), you had zero contact with women. I must say this was the worst stage in the Indian male’s history. That's why maybe Amitabh Bachchan was always angry as a young man, while Amol Palekar had to take special classes to woo the one lady he knew. That's one of the reasons why I empathize so much with the previous generation.

For this reason, be a bit guarded when your parents advice you on chastity and self-control. They actually know what they are talking about, but that's because they never had a choice. You have it.

Now comes the current generation. This is the most confused lot of them all. There is always confusion, when there is a choice. For once, the women finally came out of the shackles of the past. Thankfully, or maybe not, they are now everywhere, doing all sorts of jobs. Of course if you are a mechanical engineer or a bus driver or in sales, you still are one generation behind and may have to wait! So the guys finally had a hunting ground at their colleges and office spaces. Of course, they themselves fall prey most times, but that's a secret which is best left unacknowledged.

Now there was sufficient representation of both the sexes. And there was the sudden communication boom, which made all that messaging and calling possible. So nice of the telecom operators; as if the men didn’t have a big enough leash around their necks, now they had to explain their every action, and spell out their every location. Add to that all the relationship drama on various American sitcoms which we could download now at negligible cost. So sitting at our homes in the gullies of Delhi or Chennai, we were actually taking relationship advice from Joey or Barney, while our sex-lives weren’t any better than that of Wolowitz.

This exposure caused more harm than good. It raised our expectations, without there being much change in the ground realities. There was just an increase in the transaction costs, without much change in the results. So instead of the beaches, park benches, Rs.5 Vada Pavs and Rs.20 cinema halls, now the guys had to take the chicks to fancy malls, posh pubs, buy them Subs and see the same kind of movies at Rs.350 per head multiplexes.

While social networking websites clocked the biggest growth-rates worldwide, the matrimonial sites outgrew them in India. The Indians do know how best to use their IT. Now it’s a common trend to look up a possible bride in Facebook, just to see if she is as much of a saint as her matrimonial profile suggests, while on her part, it’s just a matter of tweaking some privacy settings on Facebook, and all remains well.

A new trend emerged. The arranged marriage scenario changed, from one where the parents had the final say, to where the parents started acting as a dating service. It’s pretty common to see young couples getting engaged, then starting to go out together, just like any normal couple who are seeing each other. In the past, any meeting of the bride and groom before marriage was considered taboo. Now it’s become a way of life. And if the couple feel they don’t get along during this phase, then engagements are easily broken. We are just waiting for the time when parents could run this dating service without having the need to label it as an engagement.

This generation also saw a lot of cross cultural exposure, a newly discovered fascination and curiosity in people from other regions. While instances of flaring tempers because of intolerance to a different culture are quite common place and many such feelings are often given vent over the online medium, the getting together of different kinds of people also resulted in an overflow of passion, which had been quite bridled-in due to familiarity in the past years.  The cross-cultural mix-up added new elements of novelty and discovery to the age old mating game, thus adding more spice to it.

With the rapid globalisation, and the current generation transitioning to parenthood, it would be interesting to see how the game pans out in the next set. Maybe parents would beg their children to marry within their country, in place of within their caste. Maybe Facebook would add matrimony features within the Indian version of its website. Or maybe the concept of matrimony itself may become extinct. Whatever happens, the hope remains that the game doesn’t get any more complicated than this. The damn species stands the risk of extinction otherwise.