We wish to address the articles on forced marriages and arranged marriages in a prominent GTA newspaper over the Nov14-15 weekend.
Sandeep Kaur calls the volume that holds her 30-page collection of wedding photos a book of lies.– The Toronto Star
As regards forced marriages, it’s a no-brainer and not worth wasting time over. Its perpetrators should be tried and when found guilty, jailed or in keeping with today’s liberal attitudes sent for rehab.
As regards arranged marriages. That is very interesting. Growing up in Canada we are conditioned towards falling in love before getting married. However, all of the parents of the undersigned had arranged marriages where they learnt to love after their marriage. Now that is an alien thought to Canadians. They wonder how our parents can do that and still be together for more than 20 years. Maybe they can learn something. However, after much deliberation, we are summarizing our conclusion.
Sandeep Chand, 34, has been coerced into marriage twice.– The Toronto Star
Arranged marriages may have worked for our parents who lived in India where their parents moved around in the same circle with people of similar backgrounds and in more or less the same environment .We don’t believe it will work if we, brought up and bred in Canada, are sent to India, especially to certain rural areas where our parents hail from and are given choices from that area to meet and hang out for a few days before we decide. We neither move in the same circle nor are of the same background. Our education and environment are definitely different. We do not mean to suggest we are better in any way, just that we are different and such alliances would not work. Maybe if they arranged marriages between the young ones here, they might work.
The love marriage angle is very difficult. Despite the fact that many of us believe we will find either the king or queen of our dreams and live happily ever after, the divorce rates in Canada are very high so we are stumped. We nonetheless believe that with our upbringing sprinkled with the notion of love as depicted in Bollywood we should be able to transcend that huge barrier of divorce. We hope that the values inculcated by our parents to stick together through thick and thin and their stories of Laila and Majnu and Heer and Ranja of true love will lead to us finding our ideal mate and be together till the end.
In other words we all, despite numbers showing the contrary, would rather fall in love and then marry and take our chances, than go for arranged marriages, but we don’t harbour any ill thoughts towards those who opt for the latter.As for those who force marriages on their children, we would rather keep our strong thoughts against them to ourselves or they might offend your readers.
For your reference:
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/726066–lost-brides-when-arranged-marriages-go-quickly-awry
Author: Aarti,Adnan, Aisha, Gurpreet, Jay, Karim, Kusum, Manny, Melrose,Navnit,Prem,Priyanka, Raj, Raju, Renu, Saima & Wilbert hold group discussions every week. This week these young adults discussed marriages and facade associated with it.
