Book Review - Love Will Follow: Why The Indian Marriage Is Burning

Love Will Follow: Why The Indian Marriage Is Burning by Shaifali Sandhya
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Is this really a book? Merely binding a few pages with glue and thread and giving it a cardboard cover does not make it so. So is it really a book?
It read more like a final year Psychology report than a work of non-fiction. It does qualify as an account of what plagues the Indian marriage today but fails to rise above being precisely that, an account. It is a structured compilation of interviews, opinions and deductions, with lots of subjects, but no characters.

It is not entirely unfounded to expect works of non-fiction to invest in characters. They too tell stories - albeit real ones. In writing this book from a entirely diagnostic point of view, I think the author has erred in that the book fails to titillate the reader and evokes no empathy from him whatsoever. In trying to become simultaneously a 'book'-book and a psychology text, the author has truly fallen between two chairs.


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The Great Indian Band Phenomenon

Do you know that over 90% of bands that were formed in the 2000s had members who had a room of their own when they grew up in the nineties? That over 80% of them owned a PC and a walkman? And that over 70% of them had access to dial-up internet before the year 2000? 

Apologies, the numbers are made up. But the statistics are not. Just replace the percentage figures with “most" and this will give us two insights- one, on how percentages can be quoted to make an article sound well-researched and two, how the “Great Indian Band Phenomenon” came to be.

The world's first portable mp3 player,
The Audio Highway Listen Up.
(Photo courtesy TIME magazine)

What did you grow up listening to? If you were a part of the average papa-mummy family unit of the nineties, it is unlikely that you listened to music on the then state-of-the-art Audio Highway Listen Up (Not if you pocketed a 75000$ allowance, that is) My own narrow avenue to the world of music was a rickety-rackety BPL two-in-one tape player. Being from a respectable middle class family, this piece of sonic equipment was strictly vegetarian. It would play ghazals and ballads of the Sanu-Udit-Alka musical triumvirate of the 90s with glee, while stubbornly refusing to play Backstreet Boys or anything beyond. Any English songs’ cassette that went in was faithfully disembowelled  and came out with tangled ribbons of magnetic tape that had to be surgically unravelled and then rolled back (a Nataraj pencil or Reynolds pen cap usually did the trick)

The prized possession back in the days was the walkman. Personally, I think it was a wonderful gizmo and I rate it above both the tablet and the touch phone as a trend setting gadget, (and so does TIME. See TIME's list of the most influential gadgets: Sony Walkman) for it spared mummies and daddies from listening to outrageous mentions of love (of the other kind) and body-parts in lyrics of hip-hop and pop songs which could now thump directly in our ears. Still, our access to 'western' music was limited to a few pop albums, mostly boy-band fare. Nirvana, Def Leppard, Metallica and their pot-smoking, members of the '27 club' predecessors were still out of reach. Enter the internet. Enter rock.

It was Elvis,the king, Presley who lit the rock’n’roll torch in USA, it was Linkin Park who did the same in India. To some of us angst laden teenagers, their songs carried true meaning. They were songs on how they were betrayed in love and “in the end” lost the love of their lives. I didn’t have one to start with, but I could nevertheless, relate to the music. At about the same time, some kids listening to them were thinking, “Sounds like a jumble of bartan banging drums, screaming vocals and heavy guitar riffs. Hey!! I can do this. Dad, buy me a guitar. Now!!”

“Pop music often tells you everything is OK, while rock music tells you that it's not OK, but you can change it.”  (Bono, U2)

Once you understand the origins of popular rock music in India, you can now understand why Indian rock sounds like a pastiche of sounds from rock’n’roll music of bygone decades. Indian rock and Indian rockers did not originate from any desire to give expression to resentment against the system (numero uno example, Credence Clearwater Revival) or to express any angst resulting from the growing pains and confused emotions of youth (as in Placebo). They were merely a me-too phenomena that is so trademark of the Indian populace. I believe the Pakistani rock scene did a brilliant job in avoiding an as-it-is import by basing their rock primarily in Urdu. Junoon, Jal and Strings use lyrics that are based in contemporary Pakistani society. In India, bands like Euphoria, Kailasa and Indian Ocean write songs grounded in Indian roots. But they are few and far between.

Rock need not always deal with issues and its lyrics need not always delve deep into the recesses of human emotion. Its attraction lies in its rawness. How its lyrics is not manufactured by paid lyricists keeping “public-demand” in mind. How the vocals don’t sound hokey and detached like those of filmy playback singing. For me, however, a rock song truly comes alive when it touches a chord within. Try as hard as I might, I cannot relate to songs spewing venom on how useless our lives are (courtesy desi Gothic Rock. Bhayanak Maut is a popular band of this genre) or how I sorely miss my imaginary girlfriend. These are trivialities better left to Marilyn Manson, Himesh Reshamiya and Baba Sehgal. 

The Bangalore Moms - Jourdain 4

Author's Note: The west has its soccer moms and the more mother-sucking, micro-parenting stereotype, the Jewish mother. But closer home, the Mother India association’s Nirupa Roy award for best all round performance goes to a new breed of Indian child bearers.  

In the nooks and crannies of India where we come from, mothers are still maa, or baa, or amma or for the anglophile ‘forwards’, mummy at most. Using ‘Mom’ to beckon our mothers still sounds frosty at best and derogatory at worst. After all even in movies (at least a few years ago),’mawwm’ was still reserved for the nalayak aulaads, full of terrible vices which in the movie, either get them killed or lose a limb or two before being reformed by the hero. But here in the land of the IT revolution where children converse in English so fluently that it puts your sitcom and Hollywood flicks’ acquired tongue to shame, things are different. ‘Mom’ is firmly established. The age of the mataji is over. No more is she relegated to the background, only to give blessings to her son when he proclaims emphatically “maa main paas ho gaya”. Enter the supermom- the Bangalore mom.

The genetic origin of the B-mom is not so much different from the rest. The mutation of their mother-genome occurs when they marry the maata-pita ka raaj-dulara, 6 figure salaried IT dude and get Bangalored. It takes a few months, but the transformation is remarkable.

Enter the sharmili bahu, bagged by the frust IT engineer guy, who after numerous failed attempts to hit on his female co-workers and ogling at pics of false apsaras on fakebook, settles for a good-ol’ arranged  marriage, in a final attempt to vent his………(uhmm) steam.

“Aaj sham, friends ka get together hai. Taiyaar ho jaana” proclaims the newly installed groom. The bahu reaches for her best pair of salwaar-kameez. The groom moans inside, disappointed. But says nothing. The friends come. The bahu ogles in disbelief at their wives who wear T-shirts and Levis, sipping Breezers and Cola, their kids at daycare for the evening. “Such freedom, such vigour. I have to get myself one of those,” the groom muses. The bahu catches his hungry expression. She’s saddened, but filled with resolve, “I will become, I shall overcome.”  Thus begins the transformation.

But hang on, why call her the B-mom and not the B-wife. Well because being a mom is still integral to her being and the child an integral part of her marriage. The frustration of not being hip from the root-up and of her imperfect diction of the King’s tongue manifest themselves into an almost Mogambo like treatment of her children. “Mom, I passed” doesn’t elicit the same response either. “That means you got only thirty-three percent. Wait till your father gets here!” replies the B-mom. “No computer for a month.” 

In the true tradition of  this city, childcare gets outsourced to hapless thirteen year old nannies. A cost-cutting logistic solution imported from the hometown. The B-mom is free to pursue her new found interests. Mills and Boons and Danielle Steel novels adorn her book shelves. And in the evening, she has Salsa classes and aerobics to tame her torso. Even more interesting and intense are the meetings between two such supermoms which often become games of one-upmanship with their kids’ achievements pitted against each other.   

I am not being judgemental. This is what my eyes saw and my old school brain processed. And while this B-mom effect keeps bringing forth more pretty young newlywed damsels with greatly improved fashion sense, I am not complaining. (I am also a frust IT-engineer guy)

"The hand that rocks the cradle, rules the world," goes the saying. Well for generations, there was lots of rocking the cradle and lullaby wailing, without the reigns ever being handed over. Not anymore. The B-moms  rule!!