Why the fuss about adopting?!

While watching a TV serial - one of the saas bahu soaps (with my aunt of course) - i suddenly realised how our soaps tend to make a mountain out of a molehill!!

The scene showed had a son who had just discovered that his mother for 30 years is not his real mother... He had been put there in place of her still born child. My question is - does that change anything??

How does it matter? He was always a part of her life and was her son... Only now that she knows... Things will change...

Then the show moves to the next scene where he finds out who his real mother is... Lo and behold it is his own aunt - father's (the man he knew to be his father) brother and wife were the boys real parents... Even better right?

The biological mother did not mind, she sacrificed... But it was kept a well guarded secret to  protect the family from all hell breaking lose...

My point is... This is a show watched across India - Balika Vadhu (child marriage) - and is known for showing social issues in a real perspective. The fact is, even in such a show, they depict adoption as a crime... Living in  city, having dreams of wanting to settle away from the family all seems a punishable offence!

Wonder why??

So coming back to the point - is adopting bad? There is a population explosion in India... People keep having babies whether they have the financial capacity to handle a large family or not...

Fact is - there a millions of children who need the love and affection you would give a new baby - but instead people get swayed with the concept of blood is blood... Is it really?

Marriage - just like buying a phone!!

So the thing with arranged marriages is, its complicated...

You can have an arranged marriage where you have people putting up descriptions of the kind of wife/husband they would like. And then you have love marriages where a guy and girl (mostly) fall in love and get married - with or without family consent.

The fact is its always a gamble. Just like it is when you buy a new phone - you may go and hunt through a million handsets and pick out the 'best' one and still end up making trips to the service center. Or you may end up falling in love with your friends phone and taking the same phone from them and still end up visiting the service center just as often.

The thing about marriage is that it has become just a namesake. People get married not because they want to, but because society wants them to. Its the done thing - school, college, post graduation, job marriage, kids... Its always the same for everyone (almost).

People will always ask - do u want an arranged marriage or a love marriage? During my stay in London, my friends asked me if it was true - did people in India actually get married to whoever their parents chose - when I said yes, the look on their faces was unbelievable.

Fact is, no religion or culture traditionally imbibes arranged marriages - that's just a concept developed for our convenience. If you can't find someone yourself, ask your parents to help - just like you would have asked your friends.

Sadly, today the whole concept of an arranged marriage has become out of proportion. Its like you are literally going to buy a mobile phone. As when u buy mobile phones, you would first write down some features that the phone must have - 5" screen, 1 GB RAM, expandable memory, etc.; its the same with arranged marriage proposals. You can note down whether you want a doctor or a teacher or a fashion designer and the of course you can specify how tall he/she should be, colour (fair, tanned, etc), weight, etc. You can also choose brands... Oops i mean regions and religions... Its strange how choosing a life partner is not very different from choosing a phone these days!!

Blame it on Bollywood

Time and again, when watching movies i have thought to myself... Does this happen in real life... And then i'd just tell myself it doesn't and move on... Over the years, movies have become increasingly influential in our lives... Right from the kind of clothes to the kind of family functions...

I always thought Bollywood copued what happens in life... But then realised it was the other way... So does that mean our film abode has a hand in the way society functions?

So if u said yes to that... Ask yourself - do we only learn good things from movies? Or even the bad stuff? Over the years, 'bad man' in the movie world seems to have become more popular than the poor hero...

Movies, old and new, show how the hero stalks his 'dreamgirl' and wins her over... This is what stalkers do... And then when they don't get the love back they don't know what to do - cause in movies it always works!! From old movies to the most recent - Besharam - where Ranbir falls in love with a girl just by looking at her and then stalks her and she falls for him...

It's not just the movies... It is also TV soaps... Why can't soaps show that the saas and bahu are friends? Why is there always someone in the family scheming to break the family?

In most TV soaps, the minute the 'bahu' wants to have an identity of her own, why is she blamed for breaking the family?

For a country to evolve, it's important that it's people evolve... But with movies and television soaps like these, I doubt we ever will...