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According to Sima aunty, wanting to have meaningful conversations, and not just sharing grocery lists or your children’s requirements with your future life partner, makes you "not serious” about marriage.
Indian Matchmaking season 2 is back on Netflix and I can’t keep calm! Quirkier, weirder and much more vain/disillusioned individuals grace the show than what we had witnessed in season 1.
Sima Taparia, (aka Sima aunty for all) Mumbai’s top matchmaker, is back with her one liners that actually makes her no different from any other Indian relative or neighbour that one might have. She keeps reminding you how “adjustments”, “compromises” and being less “opinionated” makes for perfect marriage prerequisites.
The moment an individual wishes for basic compatibility pointers Sima aunty is quick to label them as being too “choosy”!
According to her aspiring for someone who’s your equal isn’t really an essential tenet to get married. So it really doesn’t take much time for you to understand that criteria like similar wavelengths or thought processes, similar taste in fashion/art & culture with your prospective life partner is never important. And that when you aspire for things like making meaningful conversation and not just sharing grocery lists or your children’s requirements with your future life partner, you are actually not “serious” about marriage.
These are statements that Sima Taparia will keep reiterating throughout the show.
And just when you thought that you’ve had enough of her, you are bombarded with disillusioned (not all but many to be forgotten) candidates aspiring to marry someone who can cook “good Indian food like their mother” or are quite aspirational to “have babies” or would love the same restaurant that they love.
Are these even real criterion for spending the rest of your lives with someone who you don’t even know? I kid you not! But that’s how most of them feel.
On the other hand the ones (mostly the women participants) who know exactly what they want in their future husbands are condemned, named “finicky”, “opinionated” or admonished as someone who’s at an upscale restaurant ordering from their menu!
Sima Taparia makes you realize that the concept of connecting with the “right one” can never even be a distant dream let alone a reality. She makes sure to repeat that only 60-70% match is what one should aspire to have. Doesn’t that lessen the worth of finally walking up that aisle and the rest of your lives with that significant other? Doesn’t that make you question the effort of having the privilege to hire a matchmaker? Isn’t then the alliances brought to you by some random Meenu aunty or Nupur Chachi better off?
Sima aunty is akin to most of the Indian female relatives or neighbors whom we might choose to avoid at parties/get togethers or even someone else’s weddings due to their obnoxious sense of humor or their uncomfortably eager beaver attributes.
Season 2 of Indian Matchmaking doesn’t diminish the societal trauma that season 1 initiated-the trauma of standing for yourself and being defeated, the trauma of not finding someone to walk that aisle because the society feels you are too demanding or even the trauma of “age” catching up on you and you eventually missing the final bus which most of your contemporaries have chosen to board a long time ago.
Indian Matchmaking is all this and much more. Some might choose to stream it or skip it but none can actually ignore it. And this gets quite pronounced when Sima Taparia alights a posh car and takes a smug walk on one of the famous bridges in London as to prove that she’s here to stay and so are her eccentricities.
A dire penchant for words, can summarize my life as “My pen bleeds my life”! read more...
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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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