Business of Marriage

Gone are the days when marriage ceremonies were filled with joyous sentiments and a warm welcome to a whole new life of learning, happiness, understanding and salvation. Parents were rejoicing to see their son/daughter getting married and starting a new journey of life, a journey where they will get to experience ups and downs, and more importantly, they will one day become parents. Son/daughter will be taught to tackle daily family problems with understanding and adjustment.

Now, in the 21^st century, the desire for detached freedom has become so acute and pierce that people began to find the traditional way of living a married life as ridiculous and oppressive. Now marriage is all about flashy decoration, swanking outfits, pricy jewelry and flamboyant ceremonies. The marriage expenses quite obviously sky-rockets. Both the parties are competing for the fame of getting their son/daughter married in the most lavish way. Elaborate entertaining jests are organized to keep the guest spellbound by the immensity of the marriage. But the intoxication of celebrating the marriage ceremony doesn’t even last for a week. Married couple will return back to their mundane life and will occasionally visit the moments of marriage watching the videos/photo albums.

Only when the man realizes that now he can start saving money for the education of his children, his wife will pull out her much deliberated lists of demands. She will demand her in-laws to live separately. She will demand equal rights in the in-law’s ancestral property. She will demand the transfer of title of the house to her name. The husband, being gullible and God-fearing will not see any harm in approving most of her demands. He would, however, respectfully explain to her that he cannot ask his parents to live elsewhere. She will complain to her parents of being harassed by him and he will soon be reprimanded for treated her like this. He submissively tries to mitigate the situation by apologizing. After all, if the marriage breaks apart, the society will accuse him only irrespective of whose fault it is.

After regular blackmailing, she will complain to the police of dowry harassment and domestic violence. The police, like scavengers, will immediately arrest him and his parents. The cops are also helpful to them explaining the unofficial mechanism if they want to escape imprisonment. They will be asked to cough up mind-blowing monetary compensation as demanded by the accuser. Who would want to get entangled in our notorious legal system especially one who is accused by a woman? They reluctantly give away huge chunk of their ancestral property to the woman to settle the case. The woman is happy to earn so much money that it is only a dream of people to earn it in such a short span of time. She walks away with fortune and a tag of being a victim of domestic violence, and the husband walks away bankrupt and a tag of being a culprit who wrongly got acquitted.

It is all about money. As soon as the husband tries to re-collect his composure, he then gets slapped by the court orders commanding him to provide maintenance to his wife. Now he is slogging day and night to earn to make ends meet and a portion of his earning is going into the hands of a woman who legally destroyed him. The woman is thankful to such laws in place and also flaunts her assertiveness to her friends and relatives for fighting for her so-called rights.

Woman’s rights are all about a man’s liability. More and more women are happy to increase men’s liability calling it as their rights. Women have proved that women’s liberation is all about strangulating men’s rights. What started off as a beginning of a new life of happiness for the husband, abruptly ends by becoming bankrupt, defamed, and humiliated. And for the woman, it has always been about money before marriage, after marriage and after divorce. There is no stigma on the woman for filing a false harassment case on her husband and in-laws and blackmailing them for money. What is more disturbing is that people continue to believe that women are always the victims. And to make sure that women continue to make a business out of the marriage, women groups work hard to propose women protective laws, gender sensitivity, legal leniency toward women, uplifting women’s status and defaming men as born oppressors.

In the business of marriage, men are not more than money-making machines and women are no less than legal extortionists.

1:11 PM - Saturday, October 28, 2006