Kids, this is how I met your mother.


A couple of weeks ago, I read an article about a woman who decided to marry a guest instead at the altar. Yes. A guest. She was in the middle of the varmala ceremony (garland ceremony that is performed just before the marriage rituals) when the groom had an epileptic seizure. During the melee of trying to get the twenty five year old groom some basic First Aid, the bride is aghast at all this because she was not told that her future husband suffered from epilepsy.

Ok, fair enough. We can understand her getting upset over that because medical conditions really shouldn’t be hidden from each other. The groom’s parents had withheld this information and the bride’s family was upset about this.

The twenty three year old bride suddenly gets on the stage and announces that she’s getting married anyway. To one of the guests…

The guest turned out to be her sister’s brother in law and he was just as stunned to hear his name being announced like that but he seemed to gradually warm up to the theme and agreed to get married to her. Despite the groom’s family pleading with her to change her mind, she got married to this new bloke.

In the meantime the poor lad who had been rushed to hospital regained consciousness only to be told what his bride to be had done so he went back to the wedding venue to try and negotiate with her.

He pleaded with her to reverse her hasty decision as he would not be able to face society after this ordeal and that is where I stopped reading the article and thought he deserved to be dumped like that. Fair enough that he has a medical condition, and we even know medicine has advanced a lot to ensure that people who do get seizures do manage to live as normal lives as possible. The illness wasn’t the issue with me.

The issue was in the fact that he said he wouldn’t know how to face society or his family after this. What on earth does he mean and what an idiot! First of all, he kept his illness hidden from his fiancée and then he expected her not to get mad and to listen to things rationally. Illness or not, the bride needed to make her own decision about wanting to get married to him with the knowledge that he’s epileptic. Just the way he has the right to lead a normal life, she has the right to choose if she wants to be with someone who has epilepsy or not. The relation had started laying foundations on deceit and it wouldn’t have lasted, in my opinion.

I don’t know how it is in other communities but I do know from experience that quite a few Asians are very concerned with what society thinks of them and their business. They are careful about what they want the world to know and see while so much is hidden behind closed doors. If at all anything goes wrong within the family, their first thought is not how to deal with the crisis but what will the world think.

It annoys me to no end that people think it is important what others think of them. I feel strongly about this because I was once that annoying person who felt it was very important that no one should think badly of my family or me, but that changed as soon as I decided life must go on, and people didn’t matter at all in my life. I lacked only one thing and that was self-esteem. As soon as your esteem levels rise up, you start seeing yourself and others in new light. People around will think you are arrogant or you’ve lost the plot.

Who cares, because those who matter don’t mind and those who mind don’t matter.

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