The Marriage Market | Verve Magazine - Part 2
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May 31, 2016

The Marriage Market

Illustration by Salil Sojwal

Meeting a prospective groom at his home, Natasha goes through the motions – sometimes fluttering her eyelashes, at other moments dumbstruck as she balks at the incongruity of the interlude. In a humorous short story for Verve, author Tina Sharma Tiwari takes a light-hearted look at a common marriage scenario

From sports journalism and covering elections to writing novels…how was the transition done?
To an onlooker I seem like a bit of a jack of all trades but, honestly, to me it just seems like a natural progression. I got into journalism because I loved sports and wasn’t quite good enough to be a professional athlete myself. Once in the field, the real challenges lay in reporting major events, election coverage, understanding politics and hard news. A gradual shift in this direction was natural for someone as driven as me. As for writing novels, that is a part of my alter ego, the goofy girl who likes romantic comedies – it is the time when daydreams come out and play! Writing is something I’ve always done, ever since childhood, in fact. It keeps me sane and happy.

Who, Me? Does that title reflect your thoughts?
Not really, I don’t think so. Because I’ve always believed that hard work and determination will get you everywhere and I’m not such a firm believer in luck. I really feel we make our own luck. I may be wrong, but that’s the motto I live by. And Who, Me? is about this girl who literally can’t believe her luck at one point in the book. It was a conscious effort from my side to step out of my skin and write from the point of view of a character who is not similar to me in any way.

How much of yourself seeps into your writings?
Quite a bit, I’d say. It’s a cliché but I really do write what I know. It keeps the writing real. So all the influences, from family to friends, education and work, they do seep into my writing. But that doesn’t mean I copy a person from real life and paste.

Your take on the contemporary marriage scene.
Each to his or her own — I love the fact that we live in times where at least urban, educated people have largely liberal views on matters like love, sex, relationships and marriage. I know here in India, we may not be as open-minded as, say, people in Denmark (where it’s considered strange to get married before you have a child), but we have our advantages. Like if you can’t find love while dating here, your parents can jolly well find you a ‘perfect match’. But jokes apart, the great thing about the contemporary marriage scene is that, now, one sees so many marriages of true equality — marriages where both the man and woman are equal partners in income generation, homemaking, parenting and planning.

What do you feel works about the ‘marriage market’?
There are certain advantages to the arranged marriage system, even though we may scoff at it. Yes, the whole procedure is embarrassing because you are putting yourself out there like a commodity, to be examined and perused and then either picked up or put back ‘on the shelf’. But the good thing is that it is equally humiliating for both men and women. Both are usually squirming when the charade is being played out. Secondly, I feel, in all honesty, that even the dating scene is really not that different. After all, people will either like what they see or they won’t and, based on that, you either take it forward or you don’t. So really, arranged marriages are like Tinder; only with your parents doing the screening. But yes, it does take the romance out of finding someone, falling in love and getting married. Works for some, not for others.

What did you look for in your partner?
I wanted an honest, upright human being with a good heart and impeccable integrity. That was number one on my list. I was never into bad boys anyway — not even in my teens. And I couldn’t possibly be with someone with misogynistic beliefs. Because the slightest suggestion of gender stereotyping and sexism causes me to bare my fangs. So for his sake, not mine, I needed to be with a genuinely non-chauvinistic guy, otherwise it would have been ‘off with his head’ someday. And good looks and humour don’t hurt either. Luckily, I hit jackpot on all accounts!

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