What is it about marriages? Why is it such a big deal?

A friend of mine got married recently and then the most irritating question that I had to face from anyone who came to know about this news was "So, when are you getting married?". I know, I know. Everyone faces this question at some point in your life and feel that you aren't old enough, but my case is different. How, you ask? Here's how:

The answer to that question is "I'm not getting married" which means not I'm not getting married now or for a few years but I'm not getting married, ever!

Now, everyone, including you, Yes, you! would immediately start judging me if I'm sane or has something gone wrong with me. Let me make this clear. I have nothing against the institution of marriage and I'm not like Kamal Haasan or anybody to say such things. All I'm saying is that I don't want to get married.



Why is it that people find it so difficult to digest this fact. Whenever this argument pops up, it invariably ends in the other person judging me to be incorrigibly insane and hoping that some day I'd change my decision, eventually and most certainly.

This decision was made, not recently. It was made when I was in school and people said I was too young to understand life so I'd change pretty soon. Now, 10 years later, my conviction has only gotten stronger with my experiences and other's plight in this complex world of social living.

I like my life the way it is. I don't want to introduce unnecessary complications by bringing in another person into it forcibly. Now, here come my justification for my decision.

Point 1: If I were duplicated, the other me wouldn't want to live with me. I'd just be intolerable. I know it. Trust me.

I feel everyone should ask this question to themselves before getting married. It'd reduce the number of divorce cases in the world.

Point 2: I know what all the person (whoever it is) has to sacrifice if they have to be able to live with my family and adapt our culture and way of living. Let's face it, however open and unorthodox a family is, it is still new to the bride. A strange new world unseen of earlier.

This is a major reason why inter-caste and inter-religion marriages are still not done in India. It is not about the religion. It is about daily life. How someone brushes, what time they get up, what duties they perform on a daily basis, how they greet someone, how they move socially etc etc. Each religion and caste has their own unique ways and would find it difficult to accept  a new way. Let me make myself clear (in case this blog is pulled-up against me years later by media and before they misquote me, leading to all sorts of controversies). I AM NOT SUPPORTING RELIGIOUS BIAS but let's be practical and think for a moment. How many of you have gone to another city and found it really difficult to cope with the way it functions compared to your home city. "Home sweet Home" as the cliché goes, right?

If that is the case with just a city, then why not for a life partner and the way you are going to live the rest of your life?

There are so many other factors such as financial stability before one gets married which for sure, I’m not even remotely close to achieving yet. Forget spouse. I can't even support myself for a few months if I get laid off suddenly (God forbid). One might say, that's just temporary, soon I’ll be able to do all that but is that completely true? Ask yourself, were you able to buy that dream car after getting married (with your hard-earned money, not got in dowry), that you always wanted when you were a bachelor? And how many people still live in slums and have kids and grand kids to take care of. Have they managed to come out of poverty after marriage? Is marriage some kind of a miracle that solves all your problems? No. Definitely not. Further, it only adds to your woes.

OK. Let's digress a bit and say that I, indeed, change my mind and get married one day. Why does it have to be a responsibility of others to have told me to do so? Whenever this topic comes up, everyone just assume that it is their utmost responsibility to change my mind. Why can’t it be my own decision? So what if I never change my mind? Why can’t people respect that? Why is it so difficult? What is it that makes people detest bachelorhood like plague. Is it jealousy? As the old Tamil saying goes “யாம் பெற்ற இன்பம் இவ்வையகமும் பெற வேண்டாமா? ” meaning that the world has to experience the pleasures that I have.

The other conclusion that they might jump into is that I might gay. No people, I'm not GAY. I'm pretty straight. Let me make that crystal clear.

Then there is the question of "Who would stand by your side when you're old?” Let me answer that question with another. What if your wife dies before you and what if you aren't blessed with kids or worse, what if your kids abandon you? Then what? Isn’t that just pathetic? I’ll just save enough money to get myself admitted into an old age home and spend my old age with similar people. And there's the Internet for social life. I anyways am not such a social being who needs to be out all the time. I'm more of an indoor person.

Turn to any channel that talks about marriages and the first thing they make fun of is how their partner is a pain in the smallest of things of everyday life. And ask any married man and he’d say don't ever get married but when it comes to seriously considering such an option, they all turn against it. I simply don't understand!

Then there is the evergreen saying of “Behind every successful man, there is a woman”. Well, why can't that woman be one's mother or sister. Does it necessarily have to be one's wife?

Finally, I conclude with the obvious facts that everyone ends this topic with. Is AB Vajpayee married. Is APJ Abdul Kalam married? Who were the women behind these great personalities’ success? I wonder. I urge everyone to respect and accept a person’s decision about marriage whatever be it.

Disclaimer: If this post has hurt the feelings or sentiments of anyone, I apologise as I did not mean to do so. This post speaks in general about everything and does not intend to specify/identify/associate with anyone or their views.

Open sourcing Text Books! and the future of Human Kind?

We've all seen the computer industry fight it out with the big corporations such as Microsoft (the most famous that comes to everyone's mind) to make software freely available to everyone. The Open source community is not against people making money from their efforts. It is very much for it, but what it preaches is for the source of the creation to be public and freely available for anyone to modify. Well, all this works for something like software but for TEXT BOOKS!?

I came across this thread on slashdot where an author of a popular text book was initially happy about making money in the form of royalty but became very frustrated by the fact that the publisher hiked the price of the book when it gained popularity and became THE choice of the students of that subject. He felt very bad at this dramatic price hike every year although he was happy because he considers what the students earned from it was worth it.

If everything is copyrighted and kept writing a confined limit, then we as a race would not progress much. There needs to be a revolution of sorts to change this attitude of content creators and they need to start thinking like this author did. Text books are a source of knowledge and this knowledge will help humanity achieve greater heights. And whatever knowledge is attained by one's experience needs to be shared for the common good, don't you think?



I imagine a world where every child born will be born with knowledge of the things that its parents have already learnt, like language, experiences, mistakes that they've made and the learning that they got from those mistakes. This way the baby doesn't have to start from scratch. It shouldn't have to learn A...B...C... again. it shouldn't need to go to school and college to learn the things its parents had learnt already spending their entire life. All that time spent by its parents need not die along with them.

Yes, I understand that this thought is out of the world. You may consider me to be a moron to have such thoughts and some of you might also have ethical issues with such things, but all these issues are secondary and we can sort it out with a proper system and proper guidelines, but we need to start somewhere. Think about it... a baby, born already with the knowledge of its parents, can spend its childhood learning a lot more advanced technologies and you know what, it might even grow up to discover a way to time travel or traverse the universe like we commute to work today. The key behind all this would be the incremental knowledge from generation to generation. No knowledge dies with a single generation. Think of what heights the human race can achieve. Think of the problems of illiteracy, poverty, health etc that it would solve. WOW!

And at the end of reading this, you may wonder how is this relating to open-sourcing text books. Well, that would the stepping-stone to such a revolutionary approach. The first step in making knowledge freely available to everyone would make the know-hows of each generation exponentially higher hence making us the only and the most intelligent species in this universe to have performed humongous feats and achieved great heights.

Put in your thoughts, even the critical ones... Looking forward to it, so that I can gauge the response of the general population on this concept. Keeping my fingers crossed for you guys to, if not accept it, at least acknowledge the fact that it is possible.