The demon of marriage

“Ab bas bahut ho gaya. Jaldi ghar wapas aao.”(Enough is enough. Now come back home soon)

The words are omnipresent whenever I call up home. It seems that my whole “khandaan” is chanting the lines. No matter how hard I try to divert the topic and try to act a little intellectual by discussing politics (family or otherwise), the steering wheel is inevitably veered towards the topic of tying the knot. My being in Chennai from the last two years have sucked away the last drops of patience from my family.

It seems like being in your “very” late twenties and single is as unacceptable as trying to remarry a widow in the pre Raja Rammohan Roy era. It seems to be completly sacrilegious not to panic, which is exactly what I am doing and which is completly against the wishes of the “Khandaan”.

The “rishte” have started pouring in. My family which is sprinkled out all over India, have started the hunt….and I am sitting like a judge in Indian Idol.

“Its going to take atleast a year….so we better start now”. This is what is reverberated back to me if I try to give my esteemed openion.

To be honest, its a little scary when you are made responsible for someone. When you have to constantly take care of and nurture a relationship. When you know that THE person will be with you for the rest of the life and you have to keep pretending till the end that you are still not bored.

So….finally one fine day I tried to reason with myself and asked the “inner me” that why the hell am I so scared. I thought of doing some googling on this and tumbled on a plethora of sites which were ready to provide me with the insight of my subconcious mind. I chose a test which was titled – “Why am I still single?”. Right now, it seems completly loony (even to myself) that i did something so vile, so I wont except the reader to think otherwise. But at that point of time, it seemed to be really tempting. The questions in the test ranged from painfully inane to sardonically sublime. The “bated breath awaited” output of the test was shocking, not beacuse it was unexected but because I had some grand preconcieved notions that it is hard to understand me.

It was not easy to accept the result, especially when it came from a site which ran tests like “Are you a hot guy?”/”Which hard rock star is your twin?”/”Do you desreve a swift kick in the nuts?”. I loved the last one by the way.

But the matter of the fact was that the result was correct. It said – “Come out of the Utopia. There is nothing like a perfect partner, so stop waiting for her. Simran only existed in DDLJ.” ……and it hurt. OH GOD!!!! It hurt. The reality check landed me back on mother earth with a thud….and thus began the era of grey matter seasoning.