When a world survey revealed recently that age has nothing to do with love, I felt thrilled rather exhilarated. To confirm the survey-finding, I tinkled a few people who happen to be my age. But their response was cold, frigid and humiliating for me.
Undaunted, I went through all the quotable quotes in a renowned book of quotations so that I may impress you with my authentic knowledge and the juicy subject. But that research only added to my hopelessness. The reason is: all the quotes were meant to just bamboozle the beloved, that to me is utterly atrocious. I could not find a single instance in which the lover was female, as we see profusely, in the case of Hindi poetry.
In this regard poetry of all the languages I am at nodding terms, like Arabic, Persian Urdu and English seek to pamper her ego beyond proportions. She is told what she neither is, nor can she be.
Just see: Lips like petals of rose from the Mughal garden; teeth like an array of pearls from Basra; eye-brows like drawn swords of RSS; and eyes like deep, blue Pacific Ocean! Does all this not sound nonsense to you? This sounds nonsense, I feel, to me alone.
One cannot count how many empires, kingdoms and Rajwadas lie buried under the debris of the Cleopatras, Leilas, Azras and Heers. Their legends, however, continue to mislead vagabond youngsters of the rich.
In the meantime, I came across a 370-word story in a national daily in which the lover happens to be the daughter of a rich person while the beloved happens to be a rickshaw-puller, a boy, Muslim incidentally. Some simpletons among Muslims feel happy as such marriages apparently add to Muslim members. My view, perhaps because of my shoddy study of Islam, is totally different. Such conversions, i.e., conversions for marriage don’t enthuse me. If you promise not to go to town to inform the uninformed, my view is: such change of religion is dubious means to achieve dubious ends.
But that is beside the point. The point is: How about a matrimonial alliance in which daughter of a well-to-do Bengali father falls in love with a rickshaw-puller of UP. She refuses to listen to the cogent arguments of her agonised parents and brothers and decides to marry the semi-literate boy after converting to his religion?
Read the relevant paragraphs from the report:
This super fast love story unfolded in Vrindavan, in Uttar Pradesh’s Mathura district, last week when a well-to-do Bengali couple from Delhi came to the holy town with their 20-year-old daughter. The family hired a rickshaw and spent the day visiting various temples. The rickshaw-puller, called Pappan, served as their informal tourist guide and kept relating anecdotes related to various temples to the family during the journey. The family took a break for lunch and persuaded the rickshaw-puller to join in. At sunset, when the family decided to call it a day, the daughter curtly informed her parents that she had fallen in love with Pappan and wanted to marry him immediately. The bewildered parents tried to convince their daughter of the difference in their social, cultural and religious backgrounds and said she would never be happy with a rickshaw-puller. The daughter, however, refused to budge from her stand and after two hours, when the parents failed to convince their daughter, they informed their sons in Delhi who reached Vrindavan. Pappan, who was overjoyed at this unexpected proposal, said he wanted a nikah since he was a Muslim. The girl agreed, a maulvi was summoned and, within hours, the wedding was solemnised in the presence of the girl’s family and the groom’s friends. As a wedding gift, the rickshaw-puller was presented a brand new rickshaw by the father-in-law.
One does not know the son-in-law understood it or not, his father-in-law had, in fact, the last laugh.