Worst of the East meets Worst of the West

Sometimes, I’m just so proud to be Indian. The ancient country has contributed much to the world. Search the Internet for Indian contributions and you can get a decent listing, but I’ll mention some of the contributions here:
• An Indian, Aryabhatta, invented the number zero
• Sanskrit is the mother of all European languages
• An Indian first calculated the value of Pi
• India was the first nation to elect a female leader (prime minister Indira Gandhi)
• Algebra, trigonometry, and calculus all came from India
• Hinduism, Buddhism, and Sikhism were all started in India
• Indians head up many companies, including Arthur Andersen, Mckinsey, Computer Associates, Bose, and Yahoo! to name a few.
• Mahatma Gandhi
• But NOT sexist golf pro Vijay Singh, who hails from Fiji
There’s a bunch more listed here if you’re interested, but for now, I think I got my point across.

So anyhow, India is great, right? Did a lot in the past, doing a lot now. Stand proud, shout from the hilltops that you’re proud to be Indian. Aishwarya Rai is getting to be a household name. Henna is pretty popular, as were the movies “Bend It Like Bekham” and “Monsoon Wedding,” movies that delve into Indian marriages. And speaking of marriage, I know how difficult the whole process of finding that special someone can be (okay, not personally, since I got married right out of college to a guy I had dated for 3 years). Indian men and women who grew up in America, always planning on finding someone on their own in the American way, find themselves tiptoeing in the waters of arranged marriages. Journalist Anita Jain wrote an interesting article about her experiences with arranged marriages.

Over the years, I’ve heard plenty about arranged marriages, both positive and negative. Sometimes, arranged marriages don’t work out, just as they don’t for love marriages, and end in divorce. On the other hand, my cousin in India was said to have had a love marriage, but nobody knew it – not even the couple. She and her husband had an arranged marriage, but their match was so perfect, and they get along so well, that it may as well have been a love marriage.

Ideally, arranged marriages are a great idea. Parents or close relatives, who know the prospective bride well, know a guy well that they think the girl will get along with. In fact, they know the guy’s family as well, so they are reassured that the bride will be welcomed into the new household in addition to getting along well with the boy. This is, in essence, just like a friend setting you up on a blind date, but keeping the whole family in mind. By picking a family of a similar economic standing, same caste, and same religion, parents hope that they can keep a girl’s wedding clear of some of the major sources of conflict (money and religion) by making sure the boy and girl share similar ideals. After all, all parents want is for their kids to be happy.

However, not everyone acts ideally. I’ve heard of stories (maybe just in movies, mostly just hearsay) of the groom’s family demanding a higher dowry on the wedding day, and walking out when the bride’s parents cannot come up with the money on the spot. The girl is then shamed and has a harder time getting married. Mostly, I believe, this would happen in villages in India, and even though dowries are illegal in India, the system still prevails (as “gifts”). Here in America, I haven’t heard much about any dowries being given, but maybe that’s just my naivety, or Indian people really are capable of keeping mum about certain things.

But never did I imagine, even knowing that Indians in the past back in the homeland would resort to the acts mentioned above (demanding dowries and walking out) could stoop to what I just read about in the paper. A Massachusetts family actually sued a Maryland family for falsely representing a relative in India, with whom a marriage was being arranged, leading to $200,000 in emotional distress. The charges were fraud, conspiracy and violation of civil rights. What happened? When the Massachusetts family finally went to India to meet her, they discovered that the girl - the Maryland couple’s niece - was ugly. And so the marriage was called off, and the Pandey family of Massachusetts sued the Giri family of Maryland, who had claimed that the girl was “equally beautiful” to the boy.

Personally, I’d like to see pictures of the boy and girl. My gut instinct is that the boy really isn’t all that (certainly his family isn’t). Frankly, I’d say the girl is lucky. She may not make it out of India, and maybe should get her protruding teeth fixed, but this guy is not the greatest specimen of Indian male out there.

Something tells me that other women, upon learning about this case, won’t be racing to meet him. His family doesn't exactly sound like a family I'd want any of my friends to be part of. Perhaps I'm being a bit hasty in my judgment, and I shouldn't judge them or dismiss them so readily. But isn't that exactly what they did to this poor girl?