Love Marriage or Arranged Marriage!

These words are uniquely intertwined in the Indian culture. Great literature and the colorful bollywood
would be bland without these words. So many stories have been centric around Boy meets Girl,Boy meets girl's parents
but brace yourself the parents shoo the boy away with guns. There might be many reasons for the parents to oppose-caste,
color,money,peer pressure,relative pressure,etc; But it is always there. So it was in my case too.

Yup mine was the 'Love Marriage' that rises many eyes with curiosity.The added fun part is that the boy I was in love with is not from the same community and state and talks a different language. Woah! Blame it on the  diverse plethora of diverseness that India is. Moe a few kilometers in any direction and you might find a diferent dialect,a community and culture.

I cringe to call my marriage a love marriage or for that matter an arranged marriage (which it is not!). Its a
marriage.Period.

Mutually decided by two adults who were not starry eyed or singing songs.Lust could be a factor but whats a couple without that.

Parents were asked. But as my mother put it, we were informing not asking. It is tough to be an Indian Parent.There are millions of Issues floating around a girl child to keep the parents anxious.(Please to watch
'Satyameva jayate' by Aamir Khan if you arent aware of the issues I am talking about) The least that parents would want to do is to find the prospective groom themselves after filtering him through all preferable criterons.This itself, will not guarentee their girl a trouble free life but the probability to have that increases.t

So when I bring the guy home, I reduce that probability by zillions. The unknown factor creeps them and reminds them of all the ghastly stories run in daily papers replacing each victim's face with mine. Totally understandable in  retrospect.

Then started a background search of a kind within networks of friends of friends of friends to find whether the boy had any bad habits to ring the siren. After many days of cold war in the house and at the end of investigation, the results werent at all colorful. The boy turned out to be an average GodFearing-Jai Indian. Phew! Somewhere I also had heard the same stories and was teeny bit anxious maybe.This also in retrospect.

Marriage, at the end of it, is just that..However it starts. Love or arranged. We have to work on it. There are days when we rue the decision. There are days when we thank the heavens for the spouse. There are days when you want to run away and there are days when you want to run along :D

I always joke that I only regret one thing- I cant blame my parents on way my future is paved. It would have been convenient and easy. :P