Karwa Chauth Etc.

I don't know whether I'm tipping far over the side of bra-burning feminism but Karwa Chauth has always made me see red, for a variety of reasons. Firstly, I find it completely senseless that anyone should believe that God would grant a longer life to someone based on whether his wife fasted for him on one day in a year. I have always believed that God doesn't make bargains of that sort. In any case, if that were true, people whose wives fasted would never die, or at least not before the ripe old age of 80 or so, right? So any man who dies young - do we just assume that their wives didn't keep the fast or at least not with the requisite spirit?

Secondly, if wives are supposed to be so fired up about preserving their husband's life, how about a little quid pro quo? Where is the fast that husbands are supposed to keep to ensure a long life for their wives?

I always get pissed at this 'festival', as does my husband, and my mother and sister take the opposite side and argue that anyone who wants to keep the fast is justified in doing so. Not that either of them do ( we're South indian and this thing does not exist for us). What really riles me is the countless women who keep the fast 'because it is the done thing', not out of a sincere belief in its potency. I guess, being the liberal that I am, I should shrug and say chacun a son gout - to each his own.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Violence against women awareness month

Image
As part of this initiative, I want to speak about the story of someone I used to be close to. I grew up with her, thought she was the coolest ever. She was always wonderful to my sister and I and we loved to hang out together every summer. When she got married, I was 18 and I thought she was one of the most beautiful brides I had ever seen. She went off to the US of A with her Prince Charming, the kannadiga version of the fairy tale, off to her fairy tale life, or so I thought. Her mother-in-law had some problems with the fairy tale, it turned out. Having lost her husband at a young age, she bitterly resented her daughter-in-law's 'happy married life'. Every time she went out to visit them, she managed to inject a dose of venom into their married life. The one time I visited while the mother-in-law was also staying with them I saw some amazingly bitter fights between the MIl and DIL, instigated by the MIL over imagined slights and'misdemeanors' by the DIL who was to
Read more

Winter in Delhi

One of the reasons that I love living in Delhi - all right, NCR - despite all its many shortcomings and hassles is the glorious change of seasons. I am a person who likes and revels in change - if things stay the same for too long, I get restless. I'd hate to live in a place where the weather is the same, so you don't know if you're in March or May. Delhi with its four definite seasons and a different mood for every month just suits me. In the winter, Delhi is a different city to the dun-coloured, dust-ridden one it is in the summer. You wake up to an intensely cold morning, and despite having gotten a good nine hours of sleep, it feels like you just went to bed. You burrow into your many layers of thick razais some more, wanting to snatch yet another twenty winks. It's gray outside and so foggy you can barely see the ship building which in summer is like the lighthouse marker to your home. You can see the fluffy angora fog sitting on its haunches on your terrace as you
Read more

Is marriage still an institution?

Image
Over the last few years, even back here in India which one would consider more conservative than the West in the area of marriage, one hears so many stories about marriages breaking up, people having affairs, people leaving their spouses after 12 or 20 years of marriage...Everyone I know knows at least 5 marriages in trouble, and it's something that's distressing and scary for all of us married people. Most of us think we're in happy marriages and yet you never know what's around the corner. A friend of mine made a highly percipient remark some time back. She said, "I always thought my marriage was special. But suddenly I have realised that it isn't, that it is the same as any other marriage." It's true. Most of us who consider ourselves happily married think that we have something special, that we know a secret other couples don't know. And it's a highly dangerous misconception to labour under. I was thinking back about the time when marriage
Read more