I was in a relationship with a guy I met at a friend’s wedding for over a year. Things were going pretty well till my parents found out. They didn’t approve of our relationship because he belonged to a different community and also our financial status didn’t match. I wanted to settle down, but my boyfriend had just started a job and was not ready for that kind of commitment. So, I broke up with him and told my parents I am willing to meet guys for arranged marriage.
My parents contacted a pandit, a marriage bureau and spoke to our friends and relatives to find a suitable match for me. My details and pictures were sent out and many pictures of prospective guys were sent to us. While this was going on I had started to prepare myself mentally that this was what was to be done – that the time was right and arranged marriages were not so bad after all.
To my surprise, a lot of families wanted to match my kundali with the guy’s. My parents, however, never bothered too much about it, the only thing they were concerned about was the character of the boy and the family.
However, they did give out my kundali details to those who asked for it. And guess what? I got rejected because my kundali didn’t match with the guy’s. When this happened for the first time, it didn’t bother me much. But later we were also told that my kundali wasn’t clean. A priest told us that I was manglik. Till that time, I had heard about such things only in movies – and I vaguely knew that marrying a manglik girl was supposed to bring untimely death to the husband.
A relative of mine explained that a manglik person is dominated by the the planet Mangal – that the planet symbolizes fire and the person is supposed to have a lot of aggression and anger, which may lead to lot of disputes in a marriage, if the other person is not manglik as well. It made more sense than believing that someone will die just by marrying me.
But being a doctor myself, I was just not ready to accept these things. I wanted a logical reason from the guys’ families for rejecting me. I was disgusted with such people who put so much importance on such baseless things and termed it a “not clean” trait.
A couple of guys – rather, their parents – refused to consider me for their sons without even meeting me because of this “manglik dosh”. A priest suggested that I should get married to a tree, wear some stone and fast on a particular day to reduce the effects. Solely for my parents’ peace of mind, I went through all that as well.
My qualifications, nature and personality hold no importance any more when it comes to finding a person with whom I have to spend the rest of my life. I will probably have to wait for someone who doesn’t believe in kundalis, or who is also a manglik. How ridiculous does that sound?!
My family belongs to the upper middle class in a city like Mumbai; my community consists mostly of so-called well-educated people and we had mostly contacted families from the same community. If this is the state of this category of people, I cannot even imagine what girls of my age who belong to smaller towns and come from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds have to go through every day.
I long for the day when people in this country will stop bothering about the stars and their positions and instead judge a person by what kind of human being he or she is.
Image: Shutterstock
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