Skip to main content

Mock Wedding

It is hard for someone of my vintage to understand the rationale behind Indian kids celebrating mock weddings in college campuses. One way to look at it a second chance at prom and doing it the desi way instead of fitting into something that is culturally more distant. For kids from outside of America, they may have not experienced prom at all - only seen it in Hollywood movies. Its a chance to get in on the action in a familiar setting. There is also Bollywood weddings that many might see as aspirational but reality for them in the milieu of their own family and friends might look quite different.

In a sponsored wedding where the person is the playing the role of a bride or groom, they can have an experience that matches the collective aspirations of those who are there to participate. From what I have observed in friends and family circles back home, Indian youth does not seem to be in any rush to get married and even if they do, they have little desire to have kids. Seems to match what this study found. Many reasons are ascribed to the phenomenon among which is the point of marriage itself:

..Then comes the ‘shift in the attitude’ on the significance of marriage. The youth with higher education don't aspire to get married early. These days becoming a single father/mother is also not considered taboo and many consider a single lifestyle "woke" and modern. The difficulty in finding the right partner with physical and emotional compatibility is another daunting reality of our society that makes most of the youth underconfident in entering matrimony. 

If the stigma of single-parenthood is removed, I can see a lot of people wanting to have a child and raising them without daily drama and conflict where all decisions about that child will involve bickering and negotiation followed by sub-par outcomes. Back in my time being a single-mother in India was a bit of a novelty and people responded to it with some combination on unacceptance and hostility. Even if a parent were to overcome the social pressures, they would find them stymied in getting the child to fit in with their peers and get an equal shot at school and beyond. The shadow of the single parent would block out all light from the child's life. It was unfair to subject them to that. Times have changed now and it makes sense that kids would like to do a fake wedding to experience something they likely will not have in real life. 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...
25 comments
Read more