Arranged Marriage

A discussion with a friend today compelled me to make a post on the highly debated topic. This post is not about love vs. arranged marriage. These are just some thoughts/fears I have about the whole process before you tie the knot, be it love or arranged.

How does an arranged marriage happen? The parents choose the boy/girl. The boy and the girl meet, they talk, talk and talk some more. Finding that their expectations from marriage match, they decide to get married. Is that all? Is the matching of expectations all that is needed to decide to spend the rest of their lives with each other?

Honestly, the concept of an arranged marriage freaks me out! Now let's say, the expectations of both the sides are a 100% match. You now see the personal traits and compatibility of both sides. Obviously, when you meet a new person you are nice to the person. The other person will be nice to you too. How do you really know if the person is good or bad. Ok, nobody is a 'bad' person. So let me put it this way. How do I know we're compatible? Do I say we're compatible when our expectations match and there is a good chemistry between the two? The chemistry is always good when things are good. When situations are adverse, that's where it really matters. Will we be compatible when things go bad? Or are we going to fight over the silliest of matters? I know fights are inevitable when two people live together, but it's ok when the fight is over something that really matters. Fighting over silly matters is a big pain. I hate fighting and arguing, and would do anything to avoid it. When I get married, I really would want to know the not-so-good side of the person. More than the good part, it's the bad part that I want to know. Everybody has got good qualities, which is not something that you need to worry about, and bad qualities, which you cannot take for granted. I need to know if I'll be able to put up with the annoying qualities of the person for the rest of my life. Is it possible to know what these qualities are before one gets married to the person? Or is it going to be a surprise-surprise moment after marriage? Of course, marriage is a life-time commitment and one would (at least, I would) accept all the annoying qualities and accept the person for what he is, unless it is an immoral quality that is totally unacceptable.

... which is why I think, personally, I believe love marriages make more sense. I have nothing against arranged marriages. In fact, my marriage would be an arranged marriage if things are as they are at present (You never know the future ;) ). In a love marriage, you know everything about the person, the good and the bad (and the worse) before you tie the knot. You'd have had fights and you would know how both of you deal with it. When you marry the person, you already know how the rest of your life with that person is going to be. Maybe your expectations are not the same, but the love that you have for the person will let you make small compromises with expectations, and make expectations match. To quote Canara Bank's tagline, "You change for the ones you care". The only downside is the heartache when one side refuses to accept certain qualities and the couple breaks up (before marriage, of course). Heartaches are painful and nobody would want to go through them a second time, but a heartache before marriage is better than a heartache after marriage.

Now that I think about it, love marriages and arranged marriages are not so different except for the two facts that in a love marriage you fall in love before marriage and in an arranged marriage you fall in love after marriage/engagement; in a love marriage you choose your partner and then tell your parents, and in an arranged marriage your parents choose a prospective partner and then let you know. It's the matter of how much of the person you know before you tie the knot that makes all the difference.

Bell Bajaao

It's October and it's Domestic Violence Awareness Month. It's a campaign video by Breakthrough to create awareness about domestic violence which needs to be stopped. I wonder why this video isn't on TV, or is it?

Bell bajao - Ring the bell. 2 from MeltingLAB on Vimeo.

See? You don't have to do something really big to make a difference. Just ring the bell.

Courtesy: A Line of Thought

K.I.S.S.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. I'm a fervent adherent of this principle. And it helps. Specially at times like this. It's been long since I used my creative juices and created something on Photoshop. Preparing for BSchool entrance exams takes up all my time, energy and patience; and I have little time to do anything else, and that includes eating chocolates too. With so little time remaining for preparation, I expect everything to be grasped, understood and remembered quickly. But my brain seems to take its own sweet time to push things into the permanent memory area. That is a huge frustration. So I've now taken up this policy of "Slow and steady, bell the CAT" and I'm putting the one-liner up every where. Since I use my laptop quite often, a wallpaper to this effect was imminent. So I made one, in a jiffy so I wouldn't waste much time on Photoshop, and came up with this. It's simple and stupid. But I like it!

The Making:
Though it looks simple and stupid, it took me about 20 minutes to finish it. First of all, font selection. It took time to find a font that expressed steadiness. After experimenting with about four fonts, I finally chose Poplar Std since it was heavy and sans serif (I have this obsession with sans serif fonts). The next ten minutes went in colour selection, the most dreaded part. I wanted something soothing and neutral. I didn't want the design to command me, or remind me of stuff, like green (would remind me of greenery and nature), pink (too gay :P), red (are you ordering/commanding me?? :-X), yellow (ewww.. why is that even a colour?), orange (fire!!), black (gives me an I'm-too-serious-to-think-about-colours, unenthusiastic feeling). I even tried chocolate brown, but that would again make me want to go out and buy a big bar of Dairy Milk Roast Almond :( My only option, and my favourite option, remaining was blue! No colour soothes me like blue does. It does remind me of the oceans sometimes, but in a pleasant, calm and serene way. So blue it was. After experimenting with shades of blue for about 2 minutes, colours were finalised. Then came the placement of the text. I had originally visualised the text to span the entire screen, but when I did that I felt as if the words were screaming at me. Besides, my eyes would have to span the entire screen screen, left to right, to read the text (Yes, I'm that lazy, that I don't even want to move my eyeballs :P). So I decided against it and kept it simple, stupid that would be in an aesthetic postion with respect to the four temporary icons on my desktop (For those who don't know, I usually NEVER have any icons on my desktop).

Logo-ish

This one has been in file from a very long time. Er... did I already post this? Well, anyway, here's the story of how this happened. This was a brainchild of boredom (so is this post :P). I was experimenting with colour combinations on Photoshop. I chose four nice colours, made four strips of them and placed them one above the other. Done. Now what? I'm still bored. I start clicking random buttons on the screen, and suddenly see the little used tool, Polar co-ordinates in the Distort filter. I used the Rectangular-to-Polar feature and the colour strips changed shape! The result looked nice, as if someone had dipped fingers in paint and grazed them against the screen. I now wanted to do more and make it personal. So I looked for a suitably styled "M" that went well with the design and finished it! I now use this picture as my Windows login picture.

P. S. If you're here to comment on how the 'n' looks like a 'd' and spells "Mad", shoo!

P. P. S. If you're reading this on Facebook, please please go here to comment. Blogger is permanent, Facebook is not. I love your comments and would like them to be in a permanent place. Thank you for commenting :)