Marriages Are Made In Heaven…

This is the typical story of an arranged marriage. However this is my story and therefore I am telling it. This is also the story of  the practical methods of Indian matchmaking and the value of family.

Someone somewhere is made for you and it is your responsibility to search for that better half of yours. Well this is what I have heard every day when a massive search was going on for my best other half. I have an arranged marriage and several of my American friends have asked me curious questions when they knew about it. They just could not believe that I decided my life partner in 15 mins. of one time meeting with him. The fact is that I did take that precious decision after meeting him one time for 15 min and I am very happy about it. It has been one of my best ever decisions in life. So let me talk about this ancient system of arranged marriages of India and my personal experience related with it.

In India almost 75% people get married by this old fashioned method. I always believed I would belong to the other 25% category who select their own partners by merrily falling in love with them first. But if you decide to go as per your mind rather than your heart and set up a list of characteristics of your partner then perhaps you have to follow the method of arranging a marriage for yourself, like I did. Because then, you need to search for the kind of person who matches with your criteria. And to do that you need help, a big help. Help of people who know other people in the society and upon whom you can rely. Who else would be worthy for this important task other than your own parents? For me I knew I wanted an intellectually compatible partner, he was to be a pure vegetarian, non-smoker, non-drinker and having a morally high character and he was to be an architect. Seems pretty vague but this was my scale with which we started for my search of the perfect life-partner.

In India a marriage is considered not just the partnership of life between two individuals but an alliance between two families and several issues are taken into consideration when evaluating a proposal. Such as the social status, background of the family, education, upbringing etc. The main item of this study involves the comparison of the birth-charts of the potential bride and the groom. Birth-chart is an ancient system of India and almost every individual has one made at the time of birth. It is based upon the coordinates associated with the baby when she is born. These are latitude, longitude, altitude and time. Latitute, Longitude and altitude is determined by the location of the place. Time, which is the fourth dimension is the standard time of the place and this same time is used to mark the position of the planets as it will be in their respective orbits at that given time. It is believed that planets influence our lives in positive and negative ways and thus determine our fates. So the position of all the known planets is jotted down in this birth-chart. Birth-chart is almost like a map of the person based on the knowledge of astrology, astronomy and mathematics. There are people trained from generations to do only this work and they take several days to make one birth-chart. Now here is the key. In arranged marriages where a person has to be selected as a life partner for your son or daughter, the parents have little clue to the person’s character. This is where birth-charts come into picture. If you were to read my birth-chart you would get an idea of the kind of person I really am because it accurately states my personality and my traits. It does sound like magic, but it is plain mathematics. A birth-chart is a fair barometer of a person…..if done scientifically correct. But anyway the point is that during marriage when matchmaking is to be done, the birth-charts of the girl and the boy are compared to see if they are compatible astrologically. Calculations are done and points are computed. Certain number of points have to match for the relationship to work. If the points do not match the relationship is considered not to thrive and therefore the proposal is terminated.

Once the birth-charts match, the proposal is persuaded further. Several candidates get screened away in this process. Now the parents and the grandparents and other elder people of both the families decide to meet with each other. It is a informal kind of an introductory meeting between them. If everything goes well here then they decide that the girl and the boy should be introduced to each other. Now this is a THE biggest event of the whole process. Usually the venue or the meeting place is at the girl’s home. But it again depends on the convinience of people. Traditionally it is the boy who will come all the way to meet her while she will wait for him. In this meeting the boy and the girl are formally introduced to each other. Sometimes they go out to some place to talk with each other or sometimes they simply prefer to relax in one of the inner rooms of the house and talk over a cup of coffee. It again depends much on the desposition and liking of individuals.

When I met my husband for the first time we had just sat talking in his house and our private meeting had lasted for less than 20 mins. After the meeting, somewhere in my heart I just knew that he was the person. It was crystal clear to me. I cannot define that feeling now, it was just there. I remember debating with myself over the issue that he did not belong to the profession I was looking for. I had in my citeria that my soul mate had to be an architect. And the one for whom I had literally fallen head over heels was a physicist. Physics has never been my subject. I have happily drifted off to sleep in several of my physics classes in school. I personally think that it is a dry subject devoid of colors, forms and textures unlike architecture. After meeting him I knew I had to take a decision and give a reply to my parents, who would then convey it to his family. I remember I did not sleep for two whole nights. Sometimes it is easier to say no than saying yes, and eventually after a lot of thought process I finally ended up saying yes to him. He it seems was already positive for me. We then met again for a second time to make sure we were on the right path. This time I had taken him out to one of the quite restaurants on the outskirsts of the city. We had discussed at lengths our future goals of life and what we wanted to do in life. It is hard to say what made us say yes to each other, I guess it was a purely intuitional response. Our wave-lengths just matched. We felt most comfortable around each other. And as for me the person became more important than his profession.

My mother-in-law has a beautiful way of putting this process of saying ‘yes’ into words. She says when you really like someone a bell rings in your heart and you cannot ignore the ringing of this bell, at the same time you also cannot say ‘yes’ until this bell rings for someone. So in my case the bell finally rang when I met my soul mate. And that is the best thing to have ever happened to me till this day in my life. I am happy. Probably the wisdom of ancient birth-charts just worked for us. I do not know.

I think the involvement of my family in the whole process added a mature experienced perspective to the whole process. I believe that because of my parents involvement I got to meet the most eligible suitors for me, with the flexibility and the freedom to accept or reject the proposals I received. I have rejected several proposals because I simply did not feel comfortable.

This has been the way my parents were married, this was the way my Grandparents were married. And this is the way most of my friends are getting married. My grandmother and my grandfather are married for 67 years now. When I look at them I sense a strange magical chemistry between them. They almost look and behave alike. When you mix two colors together, they combine to create an altogether different shade, it is somewhat like that. They appear as though they are one entity and that I am interacting with only one half of it. They just seem to understand each other so well that words are not required at times. In his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People-Stephen Covey has given a beautiful definition of love. He states that the word love is a verb, meaning you have to understand, you have to emphathise, you have to sacrifice, you have to work in-order to kindle the feeling that is love. And it is so true when I look at my parents or grandparents.

So marriages are after all made in heaven, it is our duty and responsibility that we search for our best other half. And when we meet that person we must work hard to kindle the beautiful fire of love between ourselves and our soulmate. Because love is a feeling created after loving a person, after doing things for a person.