So You're Single, Haan

Come thirty and like the parents of any average Indian male, mine too got frantic.

Why no marriage? What's wrong? Why this why that?

As if 30 was that forbidden number beyond which a single life was beyond imagination.

Are you in a relationship? Siblings enquire as if that's forbidden too. I proudly declare a Nay and the eyebrows go up again.

Then why no marriage? Are you??

I shake my head violently, I am not gay, I'm single.

Long story short I venture into the arranged marriage arena only to realise how competitive it is. Colour of the skin, qualifications, salary, photograph, family, horoscope, I mean I'm being judged at a scale more stringent than a job interview and all this to supposedly fall in love with a stranger and lead the rest of my life with her...Someone who has found me capable of fitting into all these criteria and someone who perhaps satisfies plenty of my relatives' criteria too.

My two cents, you know there are people like us, who don't believe in marriage, love or family and kids. We are rare but we exist. We can't compromise, we can't give up control.

So we believe in staying happily single. We don't wish to change it to married, divorced, long-distance, committed....anything.

Why can't the world just let us be?