as good as it gets

One of my favourite bloggers put in a comment on the last post I had. She said that she felt my blog was reassuring, having just watched Blue Valentine and that she was also nervous about the future. Though she is nowhere near as dramatic, the post reminds me (though not directly) of a lot of young students that I meet while teaching as well as not so young turks at work (though all younger than me). When I talk about myself and Jasmine and the relationship I share, they go like – you guys are an inspiration or you guys are ‘IT’, you guys are so lucky to have found each other and many other such words.
While earlier when I was much younger I would beam with pride, as if Jasmine and I were Cupid’s special children. But as I got older and hopefully wiser, somehow these comments did not have the same reaction from me.
I have thought a lot about this many times. Jasmine and I are not the perfect couple. We are nowhere near the perfect couple. It’s not that we hold hands all the time or that we always agree on everything or that we don’t disagree on anything or by any metric you think of. We are as diverse a couple that can be. But we fight as hard as others, of course less than some others. The way she reacts to my anger irks me even more and my thought process is completely different from her. We have disagreements and everything else that normal couples have. We agree to a few basic things, such as parenting is the most important thing in our lives, thrift is a virtue to be celebrated, travel is an important objective, reading is the source of everything and we trust each other completely with spending. Everything else seems open to disagreement.
So we can’t be as blessed as Cupid would want us to be. So what’s it that makes us tick or I would put it – stand out. While I met a lot of younger folks and spoke to them, I think one theory kept popping into my mind. That’s it. It’s got to be the theory – it’s as simple as I started my college in 1991 and that was about the time I started going around with Jasmine.
What’s with that sexy date? That’s the year liberalisation started in India. We then started getting access to a lot of brands and products that were till then only found in the suitcases of foreign returned cousins. We watched foreign shows on video cassettes smuggled into India. Basically I thought and I have blogged about it, that pre 1991, we were a starved naked nation. English movies were being played in a handful of cinema halls such as Regal/ Sterling or Eros. A good movie with great reviews would be the destination for the family once or twice a year or at best four times a year. But to my mind the biggest thing was TV. Door Darshan was the state owned broadcaster who would have prime time of one hour everyday sandwiched between the Hindi and English news. It provided wholesome family entertainment, aimed at enhancing, maintain and strengthening family values and bonds.
I entered college with no brands and locally run cable TV and exited my studies in 98 with a proliferation of brands and channels. I saw MTV, Star and the rest entering with English dominated programming and quickly moving to the local language.
So what’s that got to do with my marriage? I think it’s pretty simple. Those days not too many couples would be going around. While the boys would have loved to, the girls were coy about accepting proposals and couples would generally keep their relationship largely secretive. The odds of being slapped if found out was very large. There would curbs on freedom, friends and pocket money. It was seen as a stupid distraction and was generally frowned upon. “I did not send you to college to have an affair young one”. So generally those days, couples were a rarity and they really had to fight all odds to keep the relationship alive. Nosey brothers, parents, neighbours and the lot who would look at the first chance to snitch and spoil your life. It was especially difficult for the girl’s side of the equation. Also catching private moments together was so difficult. There were no coffee shops to hang around and chat. We would have no access to cars to go for a long drive. Meeting each other would be only during the official stay out of house hours, which would mean – college hours. No cell phones and no internet would also mean absolute cut off when you say bye. You decided the next time and place well before you said your goodbyes. Hell I couldn’t even ever go to Jasmine’s house nor call her until our relationship was officially accepted. Four hard years of agonising. Jasmine would make random excuses and get friends to attribute my gifts to. Crazy man! Absolute nightmare.
We would live in the mortal fear of being found out. wow. Real tense days. Things eased up considerably after 91 for the rest of the batches. Batch after batch came in with different outlooks, a more modern sense of dressing and a progressive attitude. In my time, not many would wear jeans to college, with many wearing salwars and in traditional day the women would wear sarees. Today on traditional day the women wear salwars. To mind, the liberalisation brought about a change in attitude as Indians came increasingly aligned to the world. Cable and Satellite TV penetration (in one research) shows correlated strongly with the improvement of living standards of the women in India. At least a lot of metro India is now open to a whole host of things. Women working is one of them. It is considered lesser of a privilege and more of a right, which it should be.
The tension I felt in those days while courting jasmine is visibly missing. My THEORY and its only that MY THEORY is that when we of old were going around, there was no time to think about compatibility. You loved someone and it was for life. A woman could fall in love once and any more was not considered normal. A man would also commit largely forever. And when you were going around the external pressures were so high that I don’t think we ever looked inwards. What you mean by ‘making a relationship work’. Of course it worked. You said the ‘love’ word right. Done. Get married, have kids and carry on your life.
When my students come up to me and tell me that they are going around, I say great; so you getting married to the guy? I don’t know is the common reply. It took me some time to reconcile myself to this answer. What you mean you don’t know. You are going around right? Now I realise that people are tuned to a lot more things in the relationship. Things that I did not understand are basic stuff like compatibility, space, individuality. I did not understand it then and I am only able to understand it out of my context. For us, her friends are my friends and my friends are her friends. Whatever permission we got to stay out of home was used to stay with each other. What is private space? Each moment away I would be dying to talk or meet her as there was a complete cut off from each other.
I guess it’s something like adversity makes people come together, kind of thing. The world was against us and we had only each other. In times like that who can think of luxuries. And I feel lucky.
I entered college with one value system exited seeing another. Our relationship was born in a more conservative system that emphasised staying with each other more than anything else. I think I was able to see the transformation of India while I was between 15 to 23 years old. In Big Town India, the generation was the bridge between the have-nots and the haves. Crucially it gave me the glimpse into tradition and modern values, and allowed us to be imbibed in older values and not be threatened by the newer ones. Because we were in college in those times, we could look at the change and believe we were at the forefront of them and actually believe that it was us leading it. Truth be told, it would have happened irrespective of us. In fact I thought my generation was the soft wimpy one. In Mumbai – college politics were wiped out, drugs were a reduced menace, hip parties were boring and people were thinking getting jobs and getting married. Simple predictable people who just got swept in liberalisation and exited to a world that looked like a candy shop. I proudly bought my dad a pair of Reebok Sandals with my first pay. I had arrived.
So that’s my theory. We were too unsure about the future to be unsure about or relationships. That was the only sure thing we had. I could be wrong and possibly people are right – it is a cupid combination, but I think otherwise. I think both Jasmine and I did think there wasn’t another alternative. So when it has to work, then you don’t have options. You only focus on what works. Possibly if the world was more acceptable of teen relationships or forgiving of break ups, possibly then ... I could have accepted admiration.
When I was playing basketball, I was happy to have simple shoes. Not Reebok or Nike but just decent shoes. I remember my dad buying me a pair of good old ‘Power by Bata’ shoes. When all you needed were black shoes for school and canvas for days you have PE class, a specialised sneaker only to play was as good as it gets.
So I guess all it requires is a simple mindset that says there is no option, but I wouldn’t recommend it at all to Jispa. I would tell her to choose, to think through, to make a few mistakes and go ahead. It will come with its share of insecurities but I don’t think that as we get more ‘modern’ can we be less individualistic. It’s worth every bit of it. You might just miss the old fashioned romance, but you can catch on a few older movies. May I recommend one – it stars Aamir Khan and Madhuri Dixit – Dil. Or possibly the Salman Khan – Maine Pyaar Kiya. Then reassure yourself anew, that you are them and they are not you.