Are you ever prepared to get married??

Since there is less than a month for the wedding now, I keep getting questions featuring around the subject of shaadi… some of the common ones which amuse me, get me hassled and the real answers of which I can never tell them…


1. Is your shaadi shopping done?
Almost everyone who meets me asks me that for the last few months. I am sure people will conjure up things that I surely need to buy even till the last day. I never knew a day would come when I would be sick of shopping. Well its come and I sure am sick of shopping. I loved shopping – agenda less, impulsive shopping. But shaadi shopping has got to my nerves. Deciding on a guy was hard enough, so deciding on the ring, the clothes, make-up, jewelry for the “forever moment” is probably the most difficult project I have ever done. I do not want to look at another sari or jewelry I will never wear after the wedding!!

2. Are you prepared to get married?
Can anyone really be? Or this there a way to be prepared? I don’t even know in how many ways my life going to change. How can I be prepared for how to deal with it right now? The best possible thing I can maybe do is to hope that I can handle it in the future.

3. So how do you feel leaving home, mom and dad and going to a strange unknown family?
This one is the best… I am delighted you see!!! I am going to strange country where I have no friends and the comfort of running away home whenever loneliness strikes… yeah you could say I am happy…. Duh!! How would I feel??
Not that I believe in the funda of leaving mom and dad… Can you ever leave mom and dad? I left home and by that I mean the physical state of home more than eight years ago so going someplace else is not weird or sad. I guess what’s not so nice is the fact that I will not be in close physical proximity to visit them as often as the luxury of Bangalore-Kerala has provided me. That will take getting used to. Secondly, the family I will try and fit into, is not strange anymore… after almost a year they cannot be strange. I guess it will take adapting from both ends… but am sure we will figure out a way.
What I will miss the most however, is the familiarity of India. I missed India when I was in Sweden for a year. And I know for sure I will miss it now. I will miss the luxury of picking up the phone and talking to my closest pals and make adhoc plans to meet them some place, will miss the place I work at and the people here, its been the only institution which has remained constant in my life for more than 3 years...

Could go on with the list… but am senti all of a sudden, and scared and nervous! I guess its time to wrap this up right now, or else will start as to wondering why on earth am I getting married… A won’t be too pleased by that one :-).

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Am Back

I am back to writing on popular demand. Ok I construe demands by a few friends as popular, but anyways…

I’m getting married!! The feeling has not yet sunk in and I sometimes need to remind myself that it’s forever and now there is no turning back (at least I hope so). Knowing me, I am sure that I’ll be wondering even when the priest asks me if I want to get married, if this is the right thing to do…I really pity Ashwin on that one!!...

Gauging all the excitement I could happily outsource all of those preparations to family and friends. However there was something I had to do on my own – attend the marriage counseling course. This post is for all those friends of mine, who have been so curious about what happens in these courses...

For the uninitiated, you need to go through a marriage counseling course before getting married in a Catholic Church. I was quite skeptical on what a priest would tell me on marriage when he had no experiential learning on the subject itself. Anyways, since it had to be done, it had to be done. There I was last weekend sitting in the class and hoping that this course would be worth my salsa class when this lady walks in and starts asking us questions like why we want to get married and why to that particular person. I was blank for a moment before I really started to think… Well that was the beginning…. During the course of the weekend we had some interesting sessions on psychometric tests and how they could be used for good marriages.. I for one was quite amused by this new purpose of a psychometric test. Well there was a lot more on understanding basic differences between men and women and how both must learn to understand and adjust…etc etc…

My take and learning from the weekend – the church is after all not all that age old. Some of the stuff that the counselors talked off impressed me beyond limits. They talked of why individual spaces were important and getting married need not necessarily mean changing a 100 % (I was glad I was proved right yet again!) and how it was important not to let any other relationship get in the way of your relationship with your husband/wife. On the hindsight I feel that though the 2.5 days could have been covered in a 1.5 day session, it was quite useful. If nothing else to at least open up a platform for discussion on difficult topics like when to have children, career choices, finances etc. All in all a weekend well spent..

I hope to remember all of it until I am married, coz thanks to dad who loves to plan everything way ahead of time and hence I have attended this course some 6 months before getting married!!

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The battle is on...

My blog has started looking more like a National Geographic write up or that’s what my friends say. And hence I have decided to finally write about something which has been on my mind for a while now, but just didn’t seem to have the courage to write about it for fear of backlash!! Read on and you’ll know what I mean…

For years I have heard my male friends cribbing about how women were confused people who didn’t know what they want, they kept changing their mind, and to please a woman was an impossible task – this among a whole list of other cribs…and when I heard stories of how those “poor” souls were tortured by their girlfriends, I felt a tad bit sorry for them as well….

However have realized completely on what a waste my sympathies were since it was either lack of tact, or insensitivity or some other stupidity that led to such behavior( if at all it wasn’t anything but mere figment of imagination)…

Experiential learning - I am going through the whole arrange marriage process right now and if I wasn’t the one going through the pain of conversing with guys, it would probably be down right hilarious, though I do end up laughing about it while sharing similar stories of guy behavior with my friends…

Most guys tell me they want their wives to be independent, consultative and have opinions.. however there’s a rider to this – she cannot have a different opinion from him and the skies fall down if she voices it openly too….another funny one “ she should be smart, beautiful, intelligent, witty, homely etc etc” – question if she was all this, why would she marry you and why not Tom Cruise?? And this from a guy, who looks like anything but Tom cruise, I mean get realistic dude!!!! It’s alright for the girl to have a job, but her taking her career seriously is concept alien to a guy… its okay for a guy to be opinionated, go getter, well traveled and ambitious , but a girl be that and she’s labeled as unmarriageable!! Then there is a breed of guys who are working in the US – and OMG do they think they are god’s gift to woman kind or what – they are definitely not going to settle for anyone else than an Aishwarya Rai look alike, how does it matter if their scope is limited to the one place in India where they lived in forever before being transported to a city in the US (some of them have a combination of pathetic English with that horribly fake American accent)…am just wondering now on who is the more confused species – the girl or the guy….

It gets funnier when you actually start talking to them that sometimes you actually believe that we women are such a superior race!! While women talk to compatibility, understanding, ease of communication etc, the guy ends up talking of are we comfortable speaking the same language (literally and not metaphorically) - now I understand communication is important, but shouldn't you look at ideas, views etc rather than the language they are spoken in, how difficult is it to master a language if you really like someone; similarities in the kind of movies we like – am still to understand on how that can be a criteria for someone to decide on marriage but whatever, oh yes how can I forget the all important question – do you know how to cook?? wonder of wonder, if you do manage to find one remotely decent guy among this crazy pack – then he for sure will turn out to be the commitment phobic kinds who is looking at girls because he’s getting older by the day but is so damn cautious about committing that he might just take years to decide!!!

Some of my married friends tell me that what I am going through with guys is just nothing; they live with these confused, erratic souls so they need to be pitied more... Living with creatures who are highly disorganized, moody, dirty, lazy, ill mannered and ungrateful am sure is not an easy task!! Its hilarious how a guy is bewildered when his wife sulks coz he commented that some chick he saw was hot – honesty yes we are all game for it, but tactlessness is a definite NO…they get mad when the wife nags on them being untidy, but quite honestly who wants to live in a place which closely resembles a pig sty!! Well I guess the list just goes on and on…

I am sure some of the guys reading this must be thinking, if men are so bad, why do women get married to them. The answer is simple, women being superior want everyone to try and be perfect like them.. men for us are like a project… we take pity on them and try to make them better, since perfection, is beyond men :P

Note to all my guy friends: don’t get angry at this one – learn from it!!

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