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CRANK'S CORNER

        What is that separates human beings and animals?

        The ability to laugh. And the urge to get married. Either way it is pertains to a joke. A sick one, some experienced souls may add.

        You can give normal, acceptable reasons for most things you do in life. You may solve some of the most complex problems. You may crack the most difficult of conundrums facing mankind. But I can bet my last penny that you cannot even half convincingly answer the query 'why do people get married'. For, marriage is not born out of reason. It seems more like a habit, perhaps like smoking. Or like watching TV on festival days like Pongal. You endure it all through and wonder at the end was it all worth it. Nope. But there is no escaping them — marriages or TV programmes. You have to watch them as others will. And you have to marry simply because others have. And those who don't embrace the idea of matrimony are looked down upon with serious suspicion by society. 'You are 35, and you are not married, ...hmmm,' most interlocutors would walk away from you, pronouncing direly behind your back 'must be because of some problem. Or is it sevva dosham?'.

        By the time a man or a woman enters his or her mid-20s, those around them have just one thing to ask: 'When are you getting married?'. It is a query whose stridency and relentlessness no FM radio RJ can hope to match. If the question is put in such simple terms it would sound at least half decent. I don't know why, but most people seem partial to the query eppa kalyana saappadu poda pore, as if the man or woman who is being posed this question is some kind of a waiter in a restaurant. Then there are others who, thinking that they are smartly euphemistic, sidle up to you at functions and social dos and coo conspiratorily 'why delay the inevitable'? Some others are even more secretively simple and blunt, framing their question with matchless brevity: 'When?'. At such occasions, you have to be quick on the uptake and smartly decode that the operative idea in question is matrimony. You cannot ponder vaguely or stutter incomprehensibly. And heaven forbid if you do that. The shameless crowd will chorus ungainly ippave kalyana kala vanthuduthu. Without marriage, you are simply deemed to be incomplete (and don't mention the wisecrack that after marriage you are finished).

        In a country like ours, it is not impossible to believe that the rest of the humanity is more interested in getting you married than you can possibly ever be. Just look around you. Noisy newspapers. Tremulous TV. Insistent internet. Nosey neighbours. Total strangers. Half-nodding acquaintances. Sleepy fellow travellers. Well-meaning kin. Scheming relatives. All seem eager and ready with just one idea: to get you hitched on to the wedding wagon.

        It is not without reason that Indian marriages are held to the accompaniment of fire: It is the last statutory warning. The best matches too, not uncoincidentally, are made in Sivakasi. Perhaps that is the other warning. But the flames of passion somehow override these more obvious cautionary symbols. Have you carefully reflected on the popular descriptions to denote the act of marrying: 'To tie the knot'. Walk down the aisle'. 'Enter wedlock'. 'Getting hitched'. Don't you think that the phrases carry an ominous ring to them? Perhaps you failed to spot it in your hurry to choose the ring. Anyway, now it is too late.

        But come to think of it, the best advertisement for not getting married can be marriages themselves. Turn your gaze around: You can see what the few steps around the holy fire can lead impressionable souls into (in a few cases, a jump into that very same blessed flames would have been preferable). Women, who just the other day were a symbol of easy lissomeness, now look like models for a new breed of pumpkin, and men passed and stressed out as if they had been asked to work overtime for gratis lifelong. And it is all because that, at one silly, but decisive, moment they felt that two heads are better than one. But in marriage, the other half doesn't come with a head alone. And at any rate, the head is crammed with silly ideas and sillier notions of most things in life.

        God was no fool. He knew man and woman are incompatible and that is why he created them as separate species. Otherwise, he would have just moulded them into one. And the entire world would have been gay (don't mistake me, I am just referring to the original meaning of the word).

        Wondering why I am foaming at the mouth over marriages? Well, I have received a total of nine invitations for weddings over the next five days. So how on earth do you expect me to support the idea of marriage?

        And at any rate, I have somebody who will probably vouchsafe for my views on marriages. No prizes for guessing that it to be my wife.