[Foreword: this marks my return to sermonizing by means of an article. I request you not to drop dead of boredom while you're reading this. All the best, and may you reach the bottom!]
“Whatever was to be said has been said. It is only in expression and eloquence that writing evolves, not in fabric.”
Man has been one to forge relationships and bondages for itself since time immemorial, which is why it is not very much off the bull’s eye to call it a social being: a product of nature incapable of sustenance without community and group dwelling.
Even when in one of our initial psychology lessons the heading ‘Psychology As A Social Science’ came up, our teacher started off by establishing and taking for granted that human existence is impossible in isolation; that the whole purpose of humanity is to collaborate and then go on to observe other duties. Bombarded with such univocal ideas, I set out to ponder on the lines of ‘Why is a social obligation, say matrimony, a social obligation?’ Why is it that at every level, as humans we are expected to take part in social ties and bind ourselves down in accordance with a set of ancient rules laid down by wizened old men in their time of leisure?
Has ‘societal evolution’ hit a proverbial full stop in this sense, and any effort to expose this fallacy is looked down with a wince and a clicking of the tongue, all in the name of demolition of our age-old culture and old school of thought? Why is it that religion is so influential a force in our times that it assumes the role of social restriction and clouds the way we would otherwise have behaved and functioned socially? Why is there a Paigambar Mohammed, Confucius, or Mahabharat to remind me how to live my life in a social setup? Why can I not be a believer unless I have to accept a certain ‘way of life’ that defines my actions and dominates my thinking? Why does an institution such as matrimony exist, wherein one has to have legal and social sanction in order to raise a legitimate offspring? I am afraid my questions will remain unanswered as long as they are, well, unanswered.
Many a men (and women, before you jump the gun to label me male-chauvinistic) have been attackingly vocal in their notion that marriage is a pointless and character-diminishing social commitment, which the sooner is done away with, the better will it be for all of humanity. Franz Kafka, one of the founding avant-garde writers of 20th Century, has famously and in my view, very rightly said, “I must be alone a great deal. What I accomplished was only the result of being alone.”
I can quote many others in this regard who further my and Kafka’s point, but I will not delve into their wise words for the retention of my own way of expression, something I have touched upon in the opening quotation.
Matrimony is considered an institution of deep reverence and fidelity, something that to me is a red herring in the masquerade of which people fornicate, or, in keeping with the parlance of our times, fuck the individual of their choice and legitimize it in the eye of the society and its constituting persons by calling it a pact. What is even more disarming is how matrimony in its status quo continues to be an open, socially boisterous and publicly exhorting event. Of course, it is but a choice of the one being hitched to decide whether the event has to be public or not, but for me, marriage remains a queer notion that I am yet to come to terms with (if that is what you call adolescence, I am your perfect specimen).
Individuality is a trait that is (in a flipside to community living) inextinguishably basic and primeval in humans (I am afraid my very limited biological knowledge will not let me safely extend this assumption to all living beings). Wherever there breeds man, breeds in it the urge to be free, unrestrained in thought and action, elusive of any contact with another human: in short, individuality. While fifth grade moral science taught all of us that an extreme of any and everything is undesirable, sometimes this bottled, pent-up, dormant individuality spurts out in one-off cases.
One worthy example of my claim would be Christopher McCandless, famously known under his self-conferred pseudonym Alex Supertramp, who gave up a financially and socially secure life to run off (literally) and live in the company of nothing except the greens, all in a desperate search of himself. Even though he met a tragic end in the hinterlands of Alaska due to acute starvation, his gleaming beacon-of-an-example provide us with profound insight into the dormant and blazingly individual nature of man, raring and restless to come to the hilt, bustling to be expressed and lived with. To douse this streak of the inherent human emotion would be akin to an assault on the very substance of the human soul, akin to asphyxiating to death a full-fledged personificated individual that is individuality. Matrimony does exactly this.
In what I see as a very patriarchal social set-up, marriage is another nail in the coffin for all proponents of individualism in humans in general and the women in particular. In the Indian society, it is an accepted norm that the representative of the fairer sex in matrimony is subject to numerous negatives as opposed to what I will call the ‘unfairer’ sex. However noble and well intentioned may have been the initial ideas behind their inception, the marital code we have given to ourselves has been interpreted grotesquely and ignobly in ways more than one of late. My explaining the ills of dowry, property inheritance laws (post-marriage) and the general sense of entitlement that the family of the groom expects to have over the bride will be entirely futile, for they are widely and ubiquitously known. Also, in my convoluted view, to have even a fraction of feeling of prerogative over another individual requires the complete willingness of the individual over which this liberty is being shrouded. It is in entirety the choice of the bride to not be a bride and never have an eye raised over her raising a child with someone who is not what society would call her husband; the same stands true for a male, in case you take me for a feminist and not a humanist.
It enrages me to see a man or woman being called promiscuous and characterless if they have been in and out of relationships like one would switch between morning and evening attires. Of course, I am not one to support what we call ‘double timing’, for that would be clubbed under cheating and treachery in general, something I try not to indulge in myself and despise to any given extent. However, when it comes to being in a live-in relationship, the society tends to label those in it to be commitment-phobic and emotionally incapable of maintaining a happy and fulfilling association, something that I again disregard and sideline as social bullshit. Forging ties and cutting them off is an inalienable right of man, it is not anyone else’s business to monitor and police a couple’s intermingling and look down to their relationship merely because they choose not to give it social sanction by calling it marriage. I am dead against the notion that a healthy marriage is reflective of the mental stability and normalcy of its constituents.
All said and done, I must make the confession that I do not have a plausible hypothetical set-up of the society that would alternate the one we have today. The idea of a family itself would not have been cradled and given shape, were it not for the institution I so strongly rally against in this write-up. I propose nothing in place of the nuclear family skeleton that we base our life on. I might not have all the answers but I do get the satiation one gets on asking pertinent questions and raising sustainable doubts over the way things exist today. I am but a fragment of the time I live in, no more no less, but still willing to be time-independent and society-independent in terms of ideology and existence. Alas, there are none (in general knowledge, anyway) who have escaped their affixed places in time and space physically, but to be an escapee in thought and mental awareness is the trait of the great. The condescending eye within me that longs for this escape and enlightenment sees (or at least pretends to see) matrimony as a damnable social evil, something which I do not have the answer to, but over which I can raise many a doubt and question.
“All the world's a stage, And all men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances…”
-William Shakespeare
