Tag: couples

Shared passions

It is said that couples who share a number of passions are closer. The corollary is that one way of getting closer as a couple is to develop shared passions. However, things aren’t so easy.

Sometimes it can so happen that one partner is a “leader” when it comes to the hobby while the other is a “follower”, and that can ruin some dynamics. Let me explain. Among other things, I’m passionate about spaghetti westerns and Liverpool FC. Pinky is passionate about chick flicks, theatre,  “Full House” and “How I met your mother”. We’ve both independently tried getting the other interested in our respective passions. I’ve watched a number of chick flicks, liked a few of them, but not so much to develop a passion for the genre. Pinky has watched some Liverpool games, but her fundamental dislike for sport-watching makes it hard for her to develop it as a passion.

We’ve tried hard, both to convince the spouse to take up our respective passions, and to get ourselves to get interested in the spouse’s passion. Sadly, things haven’t worked out as well as we’d thought. It’s been hard on both of us. Like today I fidgeted through an hour of a 90s Kannada comedy before declaring (rather rudely) that I was getting bored. Watching me fidget, I’m sure, would have made Pinky uncomfortable, and feel a sense of responsibility.

Such asymmetric passions can cause grief for both the “leader” and the “follower”. The follower tries hard to “fit in”, while the leader tries hard to make sure the follower is fitting in. The dynamics thus created can ruin whatever positive energy a shared passion can create.

All is not lost, though. I only talked about asymmetric passions here. The key is in finding activities which both parties are independently passionate about. My all-time favourite movie is this Kannada movie called Ganeshana Maduve, which I’ve watched at least 20 times. At least 15 of these were before 2009, when I first met Pinky. By then, she too had watched the movie at least 15 times. Both of us are independently passionate about it and we never seem to tire of it. We use dialogues from the movie in everyday conversation, and watch it every time it comes on TV (the other day, it was playing on ETV Kannada early in the morning. As soon as my mother-in-law saw that it was playing she rang me up. I DVRd it, so now we can watch it every day if we want).

Pinky and I are both passionate about Ganeshana Madhuve. We are passionate about long intellectual conversations (which is what made us talk as much as it did back when we were just “blog friends”). We love experimenting with food, both in terms of cooking and eating. Unfortunately the list isn’t as long as we might have liked it, so sometimes we need to invent shared passions. So far we’ve tried imposing our respective individual passions on one another, and that hasn’t worked out too well. Is there a way out?

I can think of one way out. Jointly trying to develop interests in activities neither of us knows much of currently. The odds there are lower that we will both end up liking it, but then again, we are both at the same level. There is no leader and follower, and the disruptive dynamics that ruin passions we try to foist upon one another could be avoided. What do you think we should do?

Family Associations

I spent some time this afternoon looking at the address book released by the association of descendants of my maternal grandfather’s maternal grandfather (yes, I’m serious; there does exist one such association). Since I didn’t have much else to do, I did go through much of the book in detail. The makers seem to have put hajaar fight in order to prepare it – calling up thousands of descandants and asking them for addresses and phone numbers. It also took quite long to make I suppose – my address and phone number that is put there are from last August.

The first thing I noticed about our family is that there is no such thing as a “family tree”. Us being Kannada Types and the customary incest being there, there are lots of cycles in the “family tree”. I noticed at least two cases of first cousins being married to each other. The book has handled this rather inelegantly – putting the same pair of names and addresses in two  places. However, I don’t know how they could’ve handled it more elegantly without embarrassing the incestuous couples – since the concept has become taboo only recently.

It was also interesting to look at the geographical distribution of the family. As expected, the maximum number of addresses are from Bangalore. Interestingly, Mysore also seems to have a lot of people from the family, with not too many people inhabiting other parts of India. There is an incredibly large number of people from the family in America, and they seem to be distributed in almost all parts – though with a bias to California (not just the Bay Area – I saw a number of southern California addresses.

Interestingly, other countries have little representation. There is one family in Australia and a couple of families in the Gelf. Interestingly, there is no one in England (the book lists two families with England addresses, but both of them have since returned to India (one of them is scheduled to move to the US soon) ). There also seems to be a high proportion of ABCDs – a large number of people seem to have emigrated in the 60s and 70s.

It seems like a large number of ABCD cousins and aunts and uncles have ended up marrying people of non-Indian origins, but it is hard to say where their spouses are. In true Kannadiga tradition, everyone has been listed by given name only (with a few initials thrown in here and there) which makes it hard to determine who is from where (talking about in-laws of the family).

Another interesting phenomenon is the strange names that have been given to people who seem to have been born in the last 10 years or so (I’m only talking of people with two Indian parents). Some people still continued to get named after Gods and other popular Indian names, but quite a few names of this generation seem to be the types that won’t be found in any Sanskrit dictionary.

I had a few other pertinent observations as I was going through the book, but I seem to have forgotten the rest. I’ll add them here if I remember any of those.

Arranged Scissors 10 – Modern Channels Protocol

So nowadays the process for arranged scissors has slightly changed, mainly due to the introduction of “modern” communication channels such as the internet and the phone. In earlier days, it was simple – the only way you could check out the counterparty was by way of meeting, and there was a protocol for that. There was a protocol about the kind of questions that one could ask, the standard templated answers to give, the answers you weren’t supposed to give, questions you weren’t supposed to ask, etc. And based on canned questions and canned answers, people would make the most important decisions in life.

Now you have the phone. And the internet. So you have people saying “my son wants to talk to your daughter on chat (sic) before meeting up. Hopefully you are liberal enough to allow that”. The typical answer to this is “what to do? youngsters nowadays are like this, so we have to allow this”. And the boy and girl talk “on chat”. And hope to be better informed than their counterparts 10 years back regarding the most important decision of their lives.

Now, from my very limited personal experience, it seems like some sort of protocol is being established in this “modern channel” also. Neha Vish had a nice article about this a while back on her blog, but I’m not able to find it – about a Sastri who sits behind a girl while she chats up a prospective NRI boy on Yahoo! Messenger, and gives her expert instructions. It seems like the generalized Sastri’s advise has now become part of common knowledge, and has become part of the “protocol” for “modern channels”.

The chat protocol is heavily derived from the single-meeting protocol that I had mentioned earlier. There are canned questions, and canned answers. It is in fact easier to give canned answers here since you don’t need to look into the counterparty’s eyes (though I don’t know how many “couples” actually put eye contact before making the most important decision of their lives). Heck – you can copy paste – or even have a friend chatting for you.

The essence of this protocol, as I see it, is what I call as the “direct approach”. You know that you are checking out the counterparty only for purposes of possible long-term relationship, and not to be friends, so you get straight to the point. One popular quesion seems to be “what kind of girl are you looking for?”. And then they ask about habbits and hobbits and rabbits and rapids, and about hobbies and jobs and career plans and settlement plans and so on.

By becoming part of the standard arranged marriage protocol, what has happened is that “modern channels” have also gotten demodernized, with standard templates coming into the picture. It seems like more innovation is needed if standard good old courting is to be brought back into the arranged scissors scene.

For the record, I’ve partially withdrawn from the market. I have delisted myself from the one exchange where I’d been listed. OTC search is still on but not in full josh. I like things this way, with the only downside being that I’m not getting enough material to fund this series

Update

Here is the link to Neha’s article on Boothalingam Sastrigal – the one that I had mentioned in the blog but was too lazy to dig up the link for.

http://www.withinandwithout.com/2007/09/fiction-fragment-sastrigal-and-engineers/