A column (thanks, Fuerza Dulce) from the women’s magazine Marie-Claire on Anjali Mansukhani’s enthusiasm for arranged marriages (including her own), didn’t really start in what seemed like the best possible way:
By age 26, after attending more than 150 weddings, I was fast approaching my “expiration date.” (link)
“Expiration date” at age 26? That’s pretty young; personally, I think women get “expired” these days at around 27 or 28…
But it gets so much better. Anjali, a Bombayite, meets a guy who seems like Mr. Right — a New York based banker — and moves to his 40th story Manhattan apartment after three dates (and a marriage). Life there is blissfully happy:
While I craved privacy in India, the lack of neighbors and family dropping in left a shocking void every day as I ate breakfast and lunch alone. My husband worked late most evenings, and I sat in front of the TV, unable to call home because it would be 2 a.m. there.
After a few weeks, I learned that I’d married a “jetrosexual.” He had an exhausting travel schedule (four cities in four days). I joined the ranks of corporate wives who saw every show, opera, and ballet in town, just to fill the hours.
To make friends, I joined a gym, went to the library, and took Italian classes. I discovered that having an arranged marriage was a great icebreaker, and my social circle mushroomed each time I retold my story.
Marriage, I soon learned, wasn’t easy — especially to a modern man. My husband had acquired a mistress, and her name was BlackBerry. She had the power to stop discussions midsentence, her red signal lighting up his face in the way I only dreamed of doing. (link)
Such happiness. It really brightens your day.
Off to a great start, no doubt. But Anjali’s new life really takes off when she learns to name-drop consumer goods and lifestyle choices like a professional New Yorker:
As peers in India opted for motherhood and worked on post-baby waistlines, I took Spinning and pole dancing at the gym to work off exotic dinners of sweetbreads, foie gras, chocolate mousse. After reading about America’s obsession with Venti decaf skim mochas, I went to try one — but came back instead with a spiced chai latte. Amazingly, Starbucks was providing my childhood drink on every corner.
I found a job as a financial consultant. The New York Times in one hand, coffee in the other, I realized that my saris of bright pink, violet, and salmon were not exactly subway wear. Quickly, I succumbed to Levi’s and Ralph Lauren.
I started to realize that I just might have the best of both worlds. I marinated my Indian marriage in the flavors of Manhattan. I kept the sari and bought the Jimmy Choos. I made fabulous curries, seasoned with spices from Dean & Deluca. And after months of enjoying decidedly non-Indian experiences of seders, Saks, and sake, I felt confident enough to direct Indian guests to a hotel, occasionally throwing in a MetroCard.
I’m not hating, really I’m not. In fact, I’m thrilled she’s so happy — with those Jimmy Choos that she got from Bloomie’s, drinking Chai Tea Latte at Starbucks (which is just like the Chai in India, isn’t it?), before her pole-dancing class, where she’ll burn off the foie gras from the night before. Arranged marriage can be great that way.
You know, I feel the same way about pole-dancing as I do about bellydancing- a good work out but there is no way in hell I would do it in front of anyone not a s.o..
Jasmine, if I may, a quick comment. I feel for your American friends, I really do. I didn’t marry “American” in part, thanks to my up-bringing (thanks Dad…) which was more European- but that’s just me. I have plenty of American friends (and a few girl cousins) who “behaved like Americans”- had a good time in college and sometimes after, and are happily married, some with kids. I would be very hesitant to jump to conclusions based on your friends. My condoleances to them, but I would suggest you get to know some others before you draw too many more conclusions.
rahul, the reason i suggested the mansukhani route was because i was being an inconoclastic “self respecting, enfranchised bad girl.”.apparently, according to some here, “bad girls” only come in one flavor: oppressed. (i hold that bad girls only come, but, whatever).
what this binary model that makes men recipients and women givers? don’t you at least grant that consenting adults can both derive satisfaction and emotional fulfillment out of relationships? people learn a lot about new stuff (including insights about themselves) from relationships, even those that fail. it’s true that you’re not going to be secure and happy if your sole aim is to align your lifestyle with societal expectations. however, that applies not only to matters of romance, it applies to everything else. if your idea of a great job is to be a teacher, but you become a doctor to feel validated according to some broad societal conception of successful, you’re going to be unhappy. the problem we’re talking about is insecurity and inadequate self-reflection, not some inherent gendered preferences. some women might like to be serial monogamists, others don’t. some want to be married, other don’t. some like iyer bankers, others don’t. some buy haldi from dean and deluca, others don’t. some girls flirt with rahul on sepia, other’s don’t. hell, some guys flirt with rahul on sepia.
i think it’s depressing that women become so disillusioned with the process of finding a mate that they wished their marriage was outsourced to shaadi.com. i wouldn’t take a wistfulness brought on by depression to be an endorsement of arranged marriage. don’t get me wrong, arranged marriages have their virtues. but to want to go the arranged married route because out of a profound sense of disenchantment sucks for anyone, desi or not. all this only signals a sore need for better ways to meet people and more mature paradigms of adult romantic relationships. sepiadestiny, tum kahaan? oh ranjha, where are art thou?
*more reflections on the inanity of Carrie’s pronouncements on SATC, if raised on the thread.
Anna, thanks for explaining. BTW, “imprint” has a technical meaning in the publishing/advertising world which signifies precisely what it is that they wish to leave on you: 🙂
Oops. Meant to include this link in comment #203.
So the lady’s smitten with brand names. That is not atypical. Her waxing lyrical is no different from Ang Generic going to india and speaking in the manner of ,”Parvathi, who is my maid – bless her soul – comes in every day carrying her adorable 6 month old on her hip to clean the place armed with a stick broom and a red plastic bucket. Leaving the place to her I walk out past the slum and the cow with the gangrenous leg to where Joseph is waiting for me in my chariot – a white Ambassador car, a relic from the British era. I kid you not… etc“, where the lavish brandname-dropping of Anjali is replaced with the squalor surfing by Angela.
And… I know at least one toasty brown person who prefer shopping for desi stuff at non-desi stores (sometimes even big-box stores) for reasons such as
Anyway – I guess there are different perspectives and there is no meeting ground. What I consider harmless you and others consider painful.
at last, a feminist desi dude! (sorry i couldn’t help but read innuendo into that, but one would expect you to slip one in anyway with a handle like khoofia)
sk says
And also following from an earlier comment, just had this thought to offer those considering the arranged marriage route (in desh or bilayat). I think it would be a wonderful idea if you could take the time to transplant your partner’s home environment to some extent. Then again, people get set in certain patterns after a while – and if your newly beloved is coming over on a jet plane, why force that person to adapt to your personal tics and scratches. I am thinking it may even make sense to move into a new place together and build it up from scratch as a joint endeavor. Just a thought. This may even be applicable to non-arranged marriages (sic).
Are you sure she wasn’t talking about eggs?
Down with all this liberal relativism! I judge every girl and guy who doesn’t flirt with me!
🙂
Amardeep & SM commenters, Thanks for a laugh at the end of a long , tiring day at work.
Anjali must be over the moon that the piece of fluff that she scribbled for Marie Claire caused such a long discussion here. I am soooo happy for Anjali that she was able to find nirvana in pole dancing classes, Italian lessons and Jimmy Choos.
What I would love to see in MC is a long article on how spouses of H1 B holders with arranged marriages cope with moving to a strange country with a stranger.Visa rules being what they are they would essentially have known their spouses for a short time before a separation and eventual reunification in the USA .Now that would be interesting!
205 · khoofia said:
Unfortunately, you are right. But just because it’s common doesn’t mean we can’t critique it–all the more reason to.
In a pinch, I’ve bought desi groceries at non-desi stores, too, for some of the reasons you’ve listed. But if you think she’s dropping the D&D name for the sake of convenience, think again. D&D is like Niemann-Marcus does food product.
I don’t think you’d say this if you lived next to the strip mine, the oil refinery, the factory, or the landfill that are also part of the equation. Out of sight, out of mind.
Anyway, tata folks. This misanthrope is headed off to class now.
You meant, “Anjali is over a moon made of Normandy Camembert cheese that her 320 thread count fluff which she scrawled on her monogrammed paper with her Montblanc pen, before frenetically typing it into her 17+” Macbook and mailing it off using her Verizon FiOS service was accepted by Marie Claire.”
do writers get paid by hyperlink nowadays?
only thing i can say for all the different kinds of parties out there whether you are a dixie,liberated, feminist chick or some combination of all the above – you owe yourself happiness in whatever way way best suits you and you are comfortable with. If you are still having problems with your marriage please read the magazine psychology today
Having had a quite few people in this category work for me – it is often not bad. Depends on which industry one is talking about. The H1B’ husbands and wives in the IT industry do ok. They do miss home and many want to go back in the long term. However in the first few years they are happy to live in the Western World.
One thing a lot of commenters are missing is that for many DBD women, a life like the writer has would be heaven. Although for those raised in Western lands – factors like emotional connections, shared values etc would be relevant, this is not necessarily true in the case of many DBD women.
what is amazing about it. Quite the norm in every society, is it not?
Brands are a significant part of the American experience. Quite like free libraries – still cant get over the shock.
Vikram Pandit, Anshul Jain….just cause you had a bad experience working as a broker dont mean that desis cant make it in I banking…
I remember once one small town Indian friend asked me how foriegners go about marriage and I explained dating, choosing one’s own spouse, etc. She looked very sad and said, “why would anyone have to do that?” I answered, their parents are not arranging for them, and she looked even sadder and said, “oh, I’m sorry, those poor people”.
It gave me a completely different perspective. Just like there are people who are shocked, saddened, maybe even “disgusted” at the idea of an arranged marriage and take pity on those who have gone through it, similarly, this young woman really pitied people who had to look for spouses on their own. I had never thought of it like that before, and ever since, have only thought of it like that.
Although westerners would not be beat for all the family drama and “control” that goes into alot of desi weddings/marriages/family life, still, the idea of being set up with someone who has been checked out by reliable sources beforehand and passed an acid test with an expressed desire for a longterm monogamous relationship is something that is starting to sound attractive to alot of people I meet.
The virgin in the west is stigmatised, marginalised, and even pathologized. In virtually every popular culture representation, to be a virgin is to be uncool, unwanted, and a bit of a freak. In one woman’s health class that I took at school, all of the women reminesced about the first time they went to get their birth control prescriptions and described it as a “rite of passage”. The implication was that if you didn’t have this experience at college, you didn’t grow up
Clearly the “west” is in need of serious social reform. It can’t go on forever like this. It’s not good for women OR men.
If it looks like PG, and types like PG, and goes on and on like PG…
I agree. British Columbia is full of nutjobs.
will your male children blame their lack of game to the gold-digging propensities of the spence-school-going-i-banker-loving little miss mansukhanis? sorry, HMF, i am cracking up. you always bring up the gold-digging angle 🙂 remember, it was an arranged marriage. her parents were desperate. and don’t forget the in-laws chose her. there just seem to be too many variables for this to be a sinister plan to rob poor mr. richie rich mansukhani of his hard-earned money.
Arranged marriages and extended families definitely have downsides but there are also a few upsides. One of the upsides is people don’t get lost in life or end up alone. Indians may lack privacy but there are so many Americans out there living lonely solitary lives, going home and cooking dinner for only themselves and then watching TV and going to bed.
In the West its common for women to be courted by guys left and right and then they suddenly turn 28-30 and the number of interested guys out there plummets. I’m always hearing about some Desi girl ir our “nyat” whose in her early 30s, often a doctor or scientist and she can’t find anyone because she waited too long for the perfect guy who has the same credentials she has. At all the Desi weddings she’ll get looks of pity by all the aunties.
On the other hand…
We know a know a girl w/ Down Syndrome in India and her family arranged her to have an arranged marriage w/ a guy with Down Syndrome. She went to live with him and his two brothers and their families. She’s pretty happy and is always surrounded by family. He’s also happy and he’s been given jobs he is capable of doing in the family dandha. In America both of them would have more than likely ended up living alone with their parents or in a halfway house.
JGandhi, those are excellent points which I’ve often thoguht of. I know so many attractive, intelligent, personable, and financially stable Desi-Americans in their 30s who are not married and want to be. They keep meeting and dating different people with the hopes that one of them will be “it” and none of them are. What I don’t get is why these Desi Americans do not opt for an arranged marriage. Well, a few would like to, come to think of it, but in those particular cases their families are not able to do that for various reasons. Even here on SM I often wondered why these eligible 30 somethings have not managed to find life partners yet, being as dynamic and creative as they are. In India they would be “first choice”.
I think there is a tendency to get “too picky” when you are living in a society which gives you alot of choices in life. In India people tend to be more simply satisfied when it comes to things like “compatibility”, chemistry, attraction, romance, etc. Over here we seem to want it all and end up with nothing.
JGandhi and uae_intern @222 and @223 – you make good points.
By the way, the golddigging angle goes both ways. I know of quite a few Indian guys who choose female doctors as their mates specifically for the money aspect. Let’s not forget dowry is still common in India. And even the guys who don’t care for dowry are reluctant to dress down his parents for their crap.
And there are golddiggers even among Americans. Let’s not forget the nurses who seek out doctors and don’t mind even seeing them divorced.
Thankyou for bringing up the gold digging ritual of dowry. HMF needs to address that.
Gold digging definitely happens among the ABCDs too – you can search for your true love by occupation at shaadi.com!
But I’m also seeing something like dowries happen among ABCD marriages. I’m hearing about in-laws giving the new couple money to buy a new house, or at least enough for a downpayment and sending expensive gifts to the groom. I’m wondering are these dowries or just gifts – since non-Desis often do things like this also.
Lots of Desi parents have been hoarding their wealth and living cheaply all their lives and they don’t seem to mind lavishing most of it on the new couple come wedding time.
Err. This is a much-too-broad generalization. My female cousins in Hyderabad, Guntur, Vizag, and Vijayawada typically wear salwars. (Also I’m pretty sure that neither my male nor female unmarried cousins living there are having the sex, with one handsome, sociable, living-the-Delhi-life exception.) By the way, I’ve found that it’s usually too hot and humid in India to wear jeans comfortably.
Err. No. Sure, you don’t know what sex with another person feels like until you actually have sex with another person, but you do learn the basics of genitalia from looking at diagrams or helpful pictures.
Nala,
Did you learn driving by looking at pictures and helpful diagrams?
Sex is the same.
groan Your argument (I just picked this quote because I thought it best exemplified it) is insulting to both men and women. I have male friends, teenage boys, who actually want a relationship. And I have female friends who just want to f*ck. We’re not freaks on nature. Also, among my peers in college, the people who have sex are split into two groups: the people in long-term relationships, and people who have uncommitted sex. Both groups seem happy enough to me.
Why the analogies to things like riding a bike and driving? I don’t think sex is the same. But either way, I didn’t learn how to actually drive a car until I started driving a car, but I did learn things like road safety, which direction to turn the steering wheel in when backing up, and so on, by watching people drive. I’m not arguing that you actually know what sex feels like just from looking at a picture – I’m just saying, a picture can illuminate. This is why schools have sex ed- with the hope that people will have some vague idea of what to do when it comes to things like putting on a condom.
Of. We’re not freaks of nature.
They are absolutely not the same. The goal of one is to avoid pile-ups. The goal of the other is to revel in them.
Also, once when my cousin and I were walking around downtown Manhattan, we saw a ‘Dean & Deluca’ store and were about to go in under the misguided impression that it was a clothing store. I guess this just shows the diversity of the South Asian-American experience, right?
The article read like one big newbie consumer-o-gasm, written to show off to peers/friends and exoticized for the editor who wanted an Indian-perspective piece “for flavor.”
Rahul, I missed you terribly.
::
I don’t have anything new to add re: the article. I actually think we have beat it to death. A lot of the critiques seem to be on the implausibility of her story, but also the immaturity behind it.
Nala
I got a haunting suspicion that you’re a NYU student from NJ/LI/Queens
I just wanted to add that I can actually relate to some of this. But whenever anyone brings up the ‘women are wired for relationships, men are wired for sex’ point, I cringe, because it makes all heterosexual relationships seem like the woman is trapping some poor (or rich), unsuspecting male for the rest of life with the lure of sex. But also because it ignores the point that many women genuinely enjoy sex. And I really don’t buy that the pressure to be sexual even if you don’t want to is significantly worse than the pressure from the Indian community to keep your legs closed dammit! In more traditional communities, the only pleasure that women are allowed to have is the pleasure they can give others (their parents, their extended family, their husbands, their children). That’s gotta get annoying and overwhelming too.
How many times has that line worked for you?
rahul, glad you said “pile-up” as oppossed to “rear-eneded”
I am from Queens… but what does that have to do with anything?
don’t the pictures and diaphragms add variety?
While on the subject of arranged marriages… Selva’s bride doth look comely in the red sari.
So far all I’ve seen is quibbles against my argument or disavowals around biological determinism. As the latter has a healthy scientific following vis-a-vis the sexes, I’m really not going to offer up a online seminar. Sorry if I’ve indavertently insulted someone who offered up a plaint of more substance- still trawling the thread, looking for it, if so 🙂
But a minor point of my own:
DUDE! Where did you get the idea that wearing the west is knowing better? More than a little startled that no one sharked gujudude on this one 😉
I have more to say and pr’haps I’ll a-say it, in a lil’ bit.
Nothing really. I’m from Jackson Heights. You definitely sound like someone coming from NYC/tristate Desi subculture.
I’m pretty sure that with you this isn’t a freudian slip…
Sometimes you can combine car pile-ups and sex. Whatever shifts your stick.
This comment both confuddles and amuses me. 😀 How could you tell? (& I’ve lived in super-brown neighborhoods all over Queens, the Jackson Heights/Elmhurst area being one).
whoops link didn’t work
Crash
well nala, freudian slips can be helpful too, not to mention half slips, silk slips…