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This month’s brand-new 15 minute episode of the Modern Family podcast features Tanzila, who recently married for love against the wishes of both families.
“Love… bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails,” says the Bible. It’s a wonderful sentiment to aspire to, and like all aspirations, considerably hard to achieve.
An entire generation of Indians, mostly urban and educated, are now choosing their own life partners. Girls are paying for their own weddings to boys they met at work or college. From arranged marriages and love marriages, Indians are now talking of “arranged love marriages”. Even Bollywood, that dependable indicator of popular attitudes, has retreated into Reasonable India, where inter-faith / inter-caste / inter-regional marriages are no longer taboo or even all that unusual. Only barbarians and bigots stand opposed to love in this India wherein Aamir Khan proclaims its sanctity on national television.
But reality, as we have learned over the course of this series, can be much more complicated and confusing, not to mention more interesting. When I began this conversation with Tanzila, for instance, I was looking at a young woman who’d married outside her faith, against the wishes of both families, and was now living with her in-laws. As a citizen of Reasonable India, I never imagined that her weight would be the primary problem in her relationship with her in-laws. Nor did I think of her mother-in-law’s motivations until Tanzila brought it up.
This frank and unexpectedly intimate chat is perhaps the best conclusion to the Modern Family podcast because it reminds us that human relationships chart their own course against our expectations. People are seldom the simple caricatures we see on paper, they’re the complicated result of their environment and expectations.
As Dr. Philip pointed out in an earlier episode, the old ways are crumbling and with them we lose the clearcut blueprints for marriage that our elders relied upon. We’re pioneers, each and every one of us. And our successes appear to divide us from our more traditional, more rural cousins. It is with a conflicted identity that we look toward the future.
Let us hope, then, that Love never fails.
Click to play or download to listen at your leisure.
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UP Boards Topper Prachi Nigam was trolled on social media for her facial hair; our obsession with appearance is harsh on young minds.
Prachi Nigam’s photo has been doing the rounds on social media for the right reasons. Well, scratch that- I wish the above statement were true. This 15-year-old girl should ideally be revelling in her spectacular achievement of scoring a whopping 98.05% and topping her tenth-grade boards. But oddly enough, along with her marks, it’s something else that garners more attention – her facial hair.
While the trolls are driving themselves giddy by mocking this girl who hasn’t even completed her school yet, the ones who are taking her side are going one step ahead – they are sharing her photoshopped pictures, sans the facial hair, looking nothing less than a celebrity with captions saying – “Prachi Nigam, ten years later”.
Doctors have already diagnosed her with PCOD in their comments, based on photographic evidence. While we have names for people shamed for their weight – body shaming, for their skin colour- racism, for their age- age shaming, for being a female- sexism, this category of shaming where one faces criticism for their appearance has no name. With that, it also has zero shame attached to it.
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