we are like this only

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 ...

Yesterday I watched this movie for the second time, and was moved by it all over again. I remember when it was released last year, it got a lot of criticism from the mass audience, and probably scared KJo right back into KKKG mode all over again (help!). I think it does a good job of explaining all the things that are going on in modern marriages today, whether people want to accept it or not. I remember when I was a kid, there was one Kashmiri girl who lived in the house opposite us who was divorced. All of us kids and probably many of our moms used to be intensely curious about this strange creature - a 'divorce'. On Ran Navami, when all the girls in the neighbourhood were invited to go over for the puja and the puri-halwa, we used to keep staring at the poor girl, probably making her highly uncomfortable, because finding a divorce was such an unusual thing in a middle class neighbourhood. Today, au contraire, divorces and broken marriages are becoming more and more common a...