The Quintessential Outsider

My apologies to Gabriel Garcia Marquez for plagiarising 83.33% of the title of this post, but I am only taking ‘inspiration’ for such ‘witty’ titles from my favourite newspaper, The Times of India. A few weeks back, it carried an ‘interesting’ article, and I started writing this blog post then, only to stop midway for some reason. So let me get back to it now.

The article was about ‘why Indian men are banning romance from their lives’. The facing page had another article about ‘devil women’, women who are making a career out of going around searching for rich men to marry, only to divorce them later and live off the alimony. Both the articles carried the typical tone of TOI, which assumes that any societal ‘trends’ it discusses are the norm, and at first glance, one might dismiss them as the typical bullshit that TOI regularly churns out and that we are so used to now. However, it’s more fun discussing bullshit than just dismissing it!

The guys mentioned in the first article say that they do not believe in love, but only in physical pleasure, even if it is in exchange for money. But they are not the stereotypical ‘clients’. In fact, TOI points out that they seem more like the ’sort of young men of whom most mothers would approve’. And ‘casual conversations’ reveal that this is happening all around us. The article goes on to wonder whether ‘love was always a material transaction between man and woman’. Really, we must compliment TOI for its imaginative philosophies, and for believing that everyone who talks about the ‘objectification’ of women is a ‘radical feminist’. Radical, because mainstream feminism has been hijacked by those who choose to celebrate International Women’s Day by raising a toast to the ‘emancipated’ women in the entertainment industry.

Wait.. I am not going to go on a moralistic tirade now against the article, or against the men mentioned in it. On the contrary, my sympathy is with some of those guys, who have finally ‘converted’ after having wasted a lot of time, money and effort chasing girls who would just want money to be spent on them, and then catch some other ‘jerk’ for the same purpose. And that thing about guys going after the best-looking girls, and girls going after the guys with the fattest wallets, fanciest cars, or richest dads.. oh, all of us have seen that too! I have also seen a case where a guy and a girl actually seemed to be in love and were planning their entire future together, when suddenly, the girl dumped him for someone else, for no apparent reason. The guy has since ‘converted’ to the ‘liberal’ school of thought. It is not so easy the other way round, though, e.g. if a guy similarly dumps a girl for no apparent reason (actually, the reason is often all too apparent to the guy’s male friends, but let’s not get into that), the girl is still blamed for the failure of that relationship. Of course, this glaring chauvinism of our society is not of as much concern to the mainstream feminists of TOI as the life of female icons like Shilpa Shetty and Aishwarya Rai.

Actually, whether or not people really go around searching for exotic pleasures and ‘making deals’ to ’satisfy’ themselves, they do eventually end up going to the ‘market’ to find a ‘partner’. The market may be a traditional one, facilitated by a caste-based group, or by ‘family friends’ and astrologers (I’ll just control myself here and not digress into a tirade against astrology and other ‘junk sciences’), or it may be of the new type, facilitated by advertisements in a newspaper (like TOI!) or on a website. Just like you go to buy a computer with a set of criteria in hand (processor speed, RAM, HDD, etc), you have criteria here too (education, family background, health, wealth, height, weight, etc). So unlike the traditional Indian marriage where the ‘material transaction’ was between the families, and the bride and the groom didn’t even know whom they were marrying, these new-age marriages give you the chance to ‘know’ your prospective partner before entering into the ‘material transaction’.

By the way, my viewpoint on ‘arranged marriages’ coincides a lot with that of Nagesh Kukunoor in Hyderabad Blues – he says to a friend who’s getting into one, “You are going to meet a girl for the first time at the wedding ‘mandap’ and then sleep with her that very night. How is that different from me going to a bar, meeting a girl and then spending the night with her?” In the movie, that friend may have dismissed his question in anger, but the thought bothers a lot of young people, who prefer to ‘fall in love’ and get to know someone well first. However, many of them actually make their ‘choices’ based on the same ‘criteria’ as above. The problem is not with using these criteria, but with making them necessary and sufficient conditions for making your choice.

A friend of mine once wondered aloud, “Love is nothing but a sum of various parts”, and the parts he mentioned can be understood from that joke which says, that a man needs a woman… to be his closest friend in the best and worst of times, to bear his children and take good care of them and his home, to fully satisfy his physical needs, and to be his companion in his social and professional life… and it is best that these four women are unknown to each other.

So, if this is the ideal scenario, new-age men and women ask, then why ‘fall in love’, or worse still, pretend to do so? Therefore, a lot of these ‘liberal’ thinkers just want to have as much ‘free choice’ as possible, in the ‘open market’. Steady, old-fashioned relationships are too ‘taxing’ for them, and so is ‘planning’ their future or ‘controlling’ their physical urges. Anyway, these are all bad words in this age of ‘liberalization’.

Clearly then, the least important word in the title of this post… is love.

Disclaimer: By love, I do not mean the candy-floss junk churned out by the movies, and nor does this ‘moralistic tirade’ mean that I support those social ‘conservatives’ who talk about our culture and values, preach abstinence, and/or forcibly seek to restrict others’ choices.