on way to the altar

Forty days from now, I tie the knot. Get married. With my childhood friend who was always around in my life. But something happened. And we decided to go it together, chucking our inhibitions, fears of hurting our people's `sentiments' and even the fear of losing each other as friends.

Left to myself, I would have preferred living in. Yeah. My college peers will wonder if it was the same me when the hear this. They've known me as this conservative go-getter running in and out of the library and being mad about something or the other.

But it's true. With each passing year, I'm only growing to question everything around -- from why only the woman should wear a sign of being married, to why a human and God are forever addressed as `he'. Why not `she'?

Why on earth should the husband alone be the one you love the most? Why are you dubbed adulterous even if you as much as be friends with another man? Why is chastity forever the burden of a woman? Who invented this ritual called marriage that's become a caste-based racist business today? Why are we Indians clinging on to a system of caste we don't even know how old it is?

These are questions that run the mind of probably every woman. Just as it makes me wonder always why my male friends always prefer to vent their frustration by abusing women verbally. Or why the woman in any brahmin household still becomes a temporary untouchable for three days a month, deeming her `impure'. It doesn't matter that the same woman cannot give up work at her office however tired she is. It doesn't help that she's taking on work even when she's tired.

But for journalism, I would not have as much as channelised my inner fire. My energy would have been lost in simply reacting to everything men around me did.

`Why living in? When your parents have relented keeping their reservations aside?' people ask.

It's not people who I am questioning. It's the system that people have allowed to evolve over the years. It's the structure people refuse to break for something contemporary and something new.
It's their reluctance to allow something new. It's their perennial fear of `what others will say' that suffocates.

I read somewhere that in the vedic ages, it was kankanabandhanam, the bangle-knot that held significance. Apparently the boy and the girl were made to wear these as a sign of being married, for protection from evil, and so on.

While over the ages people conveniently converted this into a ritual part of the wedding ceremony in many communities, they've not made the effort to go back in history to find out the significance of the ritual.

Living in has its enormous disadvantages. It's a Western concept. But tell me, what was the purpose of marriage in the first place? Wasn't it about letting two people adjust to each other? Don't live-in couples too do the same? And are divorces not happening despite grand weddings that more often than not leave parents near bankrupt?

I'm heading to the altar with some optimism. Am also trying to shed inhibitions. But the questions remain.