A Happy Arranged Marriage? You mus' be joking..!!!

‘Look at her. The way her mouth widens to reveal her wonderfully arranged teeth shrinking her eyes, while devouring the cake her husband offers her. Oh God!! She is terrific’

The first feeling that a wedding photograph of a beautiful girl in facebook elicits in me, is instantaneous envy. The envy is not something completely unfounded but it must be a disorder reserved only for males, to feel rejected even if you have made no attempt to apply for the position. The cheerful wedding selfies and the skillfully captured moments in the photographs do send a message to all the facebook spectators, that the girl is certainly living the best moments of her life and reveling in unparalleled happiness. But you never know until one of your close female friends get married that how difficult, marriages really are and how clueless these women are, at life altering moments such as these.

Recently, I had my colleague expressing with firm emphasis something that sounded like a Santhanam one-liner, ‘Campus-interview rejects and single people are similar. The first one is as unlikely to get a job as much as the second one will end up securing a happy marriage’.

Once women turn 24, they are slapped with a ‘over-aged female’ label and the parents begin to move like electrolyzed reactants inside a tank to finish the process of getting their daughters married. The prime criteria, is that the groom should belong to the exact sub-caste or division under which their family has been placed in the caste hierarchy even if the sub-caste has already been buried under seven layers in a particular community. A community, many a time, will have three or four sub-groups. Each sub-group shall form a caste. Each caste will have at least three sub-castes and each sub-caste will have even more divisions that may either be defined based on geography or languages that were associated with them many hundred years ago. This method of multi-layered distillation shall end up creating more difficulties such as a skewed sex ratio or a wide economic disparitiy among the competing families within the same division. Assuming that in a particular sub-caste that there are more well-to-do families, the concerned girl’s family, if relatively poor, will have to lose more in the ‘business transaction’ that is critical in executing an arranged Indian marriage. With lesser number of males to choose, there will be even lesser chances of getting a groom that matches at least ten percent of the girls’ expectations.

Even if the caste question is resolved and the economic feasibility of the project favourably defined, the parents do not skip any chance to obtain the ‘go-ahead’ signal from the most important ‘stakeholders’ in the project – no, not the boy or the girl- the astrologers. There are a proliferating number of astrologers who are completely oblivious to the personal lives of the boy and the girl, but are entrusted with the responsibility of deciding their next fifty or sixty years.

’Marry within six months or you will have to wait for seven years’

 ‘A love marriage for this boy will surely end up in a divorce’

‘Your man is located 150 kilometres east from your house and if you do not marry this guy, you will never get married in your life’

‘If you marry the guy of this star, you will lose all your wealth’

Please do not conclude that either I should be an atheist or a Periyar follower because I do believe, one hundred percent in the powers of these fore-tellers. Every time I have chosen a girl from a list of photographs my parents have shown to me, our family astrologer has never failed to reject her with only a cursory glance at her horoscope.  Atheism, shit.

Please don’t be led into believing that the aforementioned incident is purely personal and please be aware that I am the fifth guy in the gang of my six friends who have had this complaint. Needless to say, I had a female friend who used to complain that every guy the astrologer recommended to her resembled her father in his shape.

I have heard an even more atrocious incident about a middle class girl who had to choose a guy over another one, only because, only his family was ready to delay the marriage by six months since all the affordable marriage halls had been taken during that span.

To sum up, in India, anyone can decide the lives of the boy and the girl, even if it could be the unknown astrologer, or the owner of the marriage hall or even a mythical king, born thousands of years ago who allotted the clan their present place in the caste hierarchy, but certainly not the boy and the girl.

As I ruminate over all these issues surrounding a marriage, and when I take a look at the same photograph of that beautiful woman, my envy now looks certainly mitigated. But there is more as to why I feel less envious. I know very less about that beautiful woman, who is actually the best friend of my friend.

As I ponder about her, I get reminded of one totally random incident about this woman that my friend told me long back.

The woman, in her high school, had been in a romantic relationship with a guy and her parents had found it out. They had taken great pains to break their relationship and had succeeded. My friend had been present at her house when all this had happened and the girl had refused to eat for more than three days. He told me that her mother never once had spoken with her during the period.

After a long time, when she had broken the silence, she uttered the following.

“Dear, please complete your studies, land up in a job and we promise we will get a wonderful husband for you in the future”.

She reportedly, had grown out of that phase and moved on to join one of the most prestigious engineering institutions in the country. She currently works as a System Analyst in an IT company who was a bright student in her college and is currently being paid twice than what I earn right now. It seems she has had plenty of proposals for marriage from many of her college friends and colleagues but she had turned them down because of one reason. She believed in her parents’ judgement and they could not fail her.

One day, my friend showed me a WhatsApp message sent by her, a few days before her marriage.

‘I do not know whether to call this off or not. I don’t know why I consented to this marriage. I don’t want this marriage to happen. I feel like killing myself’.

DeMonte Colony and young Tamil Cinema

In the first scene of DeMonte Colony, when a young wannabe film maker starts narrating his story to his producer, the producer asks what the title is. He replies “DeMonte Colony” and the title appears on the screen with an eerie background score. This is how young wannabe movie buffs want to make cinema. They are triggered by an urge to do something different from what the audiences have been fed to all these days but are constantly pestered by the itch to ensure that their audiences are not left off the hook for even one moment, and they do it even if it needs the breaking of the fourth wall.

A similar scene in Pizza, Karthik Subbaraj’s debut movie, came at the end where the hero himself is caught in his own concocted story which turns real and the doors shutting around him, giving the audience, a desperate nudge to leave the hall with a shock. The film should have ended when the hero starts his bike in slow motion, getting away with his felony, and the truth is revealed that none of what the audience have been seeing all this time is true. It could have been pulling the rug or even the marbled floor beneath the feet of the audience. It is possible that a section of the audience could have been pissed off at such an ending which pulls off a trick at their expense. May be Karthik would not have wanted to alienate the elders in the audience who would not accept a movie that allows bad guys to live in impunity and happiness.  But if he wanted not to disappoint elders, he would not have spun the story around an unmarried couple living together, at the first place. So please tell me, why do directors do something that they would not want to, only because they have to please their masters (audience)? This is probably what every other working man who chose to do a mediocre job, does at his workplace.  

Today’s young film makers have great ideas and brimming love for cinema more than their predecessors in mainstream cinema possibly had. (Their ability and craft, I am not talking about right now). But they plant themselves in situations similar to a gala wedding, where you are pleased to see your crush which is a great chance to talk with her but, to your disappointment, she is flanked with a mutual friend whom you cannot avoid at all. You want to lavish your crush with all your heart and attention but at the same time cannot afford to disengage your friend and you manage by occasional questions to him about his pending visa process, his parents’ endeavors to get his sister married, etc. But you may know, whatever you do for your friend, he is going to feel disgusted with you.

But I am not going to sermonize, enumerating every tenet of the The Holy ‘Follow Your Heart’ Bible. Both DeMonte Colony and Pizza are well intentioned movies, to say the least. Both are horror movies and made by first time directors. Both are so self-conscious that they were doing something that others had not and both have nods to specific sections of audience through stars like Rajni(in the former),Vijay (in the latter). Pizza focused on ‘living together’ problems and DeMonte Colony features an extra marital affair, though a (needless) backstory. I am getting more similarities if I start rummaging through my ‘compare and contrast’ nerves of my analytical brain. But there is one striking difference. Pizza knew what it was doing. DeMonte Colony loses its consciousness the moment the titles begin.

It is a great idea to plot the story around an evil ghost, precisely because most of the horror movies center on ghosts that are either humanized or ennobled by their flashbacks. And a noble ghost rarely manages to spook me which is why I almost stopped watching horror after Kanchana. It is a great idea to leave the ghost unrelieved from its earthly origins even after the end and to remain mute throughout on why the ghost haunts. It is a laudable idea that there is no attempt to shoehorn a romantic track into the story or allow the audiences to get some comic relief from the ordeal of the haunting.

But the ideas remain attractive only as much as they appear now even after the viewing. As critic Baradwaj Rangan used to repeat in every review, ideas need to be shepherded from the brain to paper and reworked meticulously for the final journey on to the screen. I hear Ajay Gnanamuthu, the director belongs to my age which is possibly too young for any film maker. Dear Ajay, hundred people can have ideas. Fifty people can have good ones and twenty can have great ones like you do. But not even four or five get the stage to narrate them aloud. Since you have qualified into the last four, you can inspire others. We wannabe artists look up to young film makers like you to make it big on the stage. As we predicted, Karthik Subbaraj did it big with Jigarthanda. DeMonte Colony is already a hit, yet we don’t want to predict something for you the way M.S.Bhaskar did in that uninspired movie of yours.

Book Review: Catcher In The Rye

My friend Vinodh used to say: Don’t choose the music. Let the music choose you. Personally, this has been true for every best thing that has ever happened for me in my life till now. Maybe that’s why I got excited, when, in the opening frames of ‘Vinaithandi Varuvayaa’, Karthick ( I prefer Karthick than Simbu as I still think he is an over rated actor) would exclaim, “kathala thedi naama poga mudiyathu… athuva nadakanum...”, for love is the greatest art pursued through life. Likewise, when the book chooses you rather than the other way around, believe me, it can prove lethal. Especially the right book at the right moment can kill you. Catcher in the rye chose me at one such time. A time when every miniscule part of my life was falling apart that it appeared even my shadow was looking down upon me. I really wanted to go inside my cocoon and hit the hibernation button. “Try Catcher”, was all Jeeva said. Usually, I never ever do what he says (same goes with him for all I say) but that day I chose to go different. Maybe that was all needed to be done then.

The book was simple. The protagonist was still simpler. But his psyche looked convoluted. And here was I of the presumption that only my mind can put up such freaky outlandish shows when rattled. Only after a while I realized that his mind was not convoluted but naked. That was the moment of my epiphany. It was like speaking directly to you circumventing all those societal consciousness. I didn’t realize the exact moment but even before half the way down, the book had become anthropomorphous to me. It was like a shot in the arm, pure unadulterated bliss!! . I got kicked, bullied, embarrassed, sympathized, apprehended, impended, killed and I don’t know what not feelings of an adolescent kid intimidated by his mise-en-scenes. By the end of the last page, Holden Caulfield became my Jesus and J.D. Salinger, the Holy Father. The only thing I couldn’t comprehend after closing the book was how the fuck (I have even started revering swear words!!) could a man, half a century before my birth, record the blue print of my brain’s thought process. Then my dormant brain got hit by light. It was not specific to me but to my entire race - The Losers! The race which Fate had designed so deviously during Genesis to make their counter parts dwell in the glories of their own narcissistic world. I swear, this was a book written by a Loser about a Loser to a Loser!! How else could he have known every single stair in the caliginous castle of Losers? He should have dwelled in it.

Subjective narration at its best, it was neither Salinger nor Holden Caulfield but Holden’s mind, or to be exact Holden’s unabridged mind, that was unfolding the events through all the bizarre haphazardness. I remember having this recurring thought during my ruminations, of what if my mind had the capacity to think aloud. I mean what if that infinitesimal time lag between what you think and what you speak had by-passed all your inhibitions so that whatever you thought came exactly as words out of your mouth. How people would react to all those erratic blathers? Well, the book was the metaphor of that abstraction. Never before did a book have such a profound effect in me. There were moments when I put down the book and was laughing out loud with that particular scene going on in rewind mode in my mind. And was it funny? Yes, definitely. But more than that, it was nostalgically funny. Things which I had experienced in my teenage days owing to my vestigial brain started resurrecting. The particular instance where Holden enacts the dodging of bullet invoked my memories of the Anniyan-Ambi changeover scene from the movie ‘Anniyan’ that  my mind tried to emulate when my father got mad and scourged me for my carelessness during my eleventh board exams (It was the only acute moment my father had laid his hand on me!). One other instance was Holden’s penchant for ephemeral platonic romances. At times his he will start choreographing things for future with that girl even though his consciousness would remind him that it’s just a temporary fix.
Having said everything, the distinctive thought that hit me was Catcher in the rye should be felt through if not venerated at least. For every person a moment will come in life when self-detestation will reek in every breath of you for not being able to emulate the image of the societal embodiment that your mind had conceived of yourself. This book will shunt that moment like a blanket does for the poor soul lost in the frost.  Because, it’ll help, though not directly, to recognize the exact opposite of the conceived ideal You. In fact, it’ll celebrate and cherish the unorganized, the disoriented, the impulsive, the alienated and all those not so easily expressible layers of You. In short, it’ll help you to find those missing jigsaw pieces to identify You.

Had I got this book during my teens, my life would have been completely different. Different in the sense my understanding towards the same life would have been way better. For the first time in my life, I was proud of being the way I am. The exact randomness of my life which was a liability till then had all of a sudden become my biggest asset. I don’t know how long it is going to be this way. But I’m sure that whenever I feel like going back to my cocoon, Holden Caulfield would be waiting there with open hands to welcome me. I was jumping with joy like a mad man for my life being the way it is and was looking forward with open arms to confront the next weapon from the arsenal of life. Somewhere deep in mind I could hear the muffled voice of the commander from Tennyson’s verses,

“Forward the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns! ”

-Arulmozhivarman T