CHENNAI: I Smell rats all over!” screamed out my friend Ganesh, barely a minute after he joined me at the coffee shop. I knew instantly that this was not going to be anything like the ‘perfect, lazy, chilled-out’ Sunday afternoon that I had in mind. “Ok, so there goes another weekend to the dogs!” I thought to myself.
It has been two weeks since Ganesh had dropped into this girl’s house for the Ponnu-pakkum ceremony (literally meaning ‘seeing the girl’, otherwise, intended to be a ceremony when a man drops into a girl’s house to see her, along with his family and analyse her strengths and weaknesses, hawk-eyed, before deciding to get engaged with her. A typical feature in an arranged marriage), and they had not replied yet.
Well, it was not exactly Ganesh’s lovesickness that forbade me from spending a Sunday afternoon the way normal people do: unwinding. It was the fact that the girl’s father had been sending spies to almost every possible place, even vaguely connected to Ganesh; his office, his regular pub (Yeah, the old man now knows Ganesh drinks!), his distant relatives’ house, his former workplace and so on.
“Can you imagine? My possible future father-in-law now knows more about me than I do myself. I get the creeps, not because he’ll know all my well-hid secrets, but because I feel he’ll jump out of my closet, when I open it someday! Now, if only the girl wasn’t pretty..
hmm..” It’s funny, you know. Because as long as we’re all normal humans, we’re going to do both beautiful things and ‘nasty’ things like getting pissed, having flings, falling in love, having fights, smoking cigarettes, drinking beer, dancing, laughing out loud, losing mobile phones and so on.
And prospective brides and grooms are no angels either.
Their pasts may be known to the world or kept secret. Half of the dozen people around you may adore you or detest you for a hundred reasons; your success, your failure, or just the way you are. Deciding one’s life partner on the basis of things like this is simply being immature and contingent; a sort of dirty business not 50-something or older moms and dads should indulge in.
I know men who appeared to be as clear as crystal before marriage and turned out to be womanizers after tying the knot. You want to know someone, use your own brain, and question him/her face to face. Quit being a rat!
saranyachakrapani@epmltd.com