Maggu was good at studies since his childhood. A bachelor's degree in Engineering from IIT and an MBA from IIM spoke volumes about his academic achievements. Working for a top-notch Consulting firm with a hefty salary package, he was living the dream of today's Indian youth. All was going well until he reached the age when it was time to get married. Having devoted his whole youth to studies and career, and having studied in a highly-skewed-sex-ratio environment, he hardly had time/opportunities to interact with women (of his age). So, when most of his not-so-qualified (non-IIT, non-IIM) friends were getting married to their girlfriends, Maggu felt an intense peer-pressure.
Having been under pressure many a times in his academic life and having come out with flying colors in such situations, he was confident about tackling this situation quite easily with his meticulous planning and hard-work. He planned to solve this issue just the way he had been cracking the client use-cases in the Consulting world. He decided to first brainstorm on the issue at hand, then list out the possible solutions, evaluate those, and finally arrive at the feasible solution. To begin with, theoretically, he had two choices at this juncture: Love Marriage and Arranged Marriage. He decided to brainstorm on Love Marriage first. (In his calculative mind) "hmm...Let me see...For this, first I've to fall in love with a girl. Then, I've to convince her to fall in love with me. This would entail a substantial amount of investment in time and money. Also, going by the scracity driven high-handedness developed in the so-called decent-enough girls, the probability of finding such a suitable girl is going to be very bleak, especially given that I'd be finding a very little time for this extracurricular activity in my tight work schedule. Then there are certain other issues such as convincing the parents if the girl is from other caste/religion, be the mediator if any party raises any concern, etc."
All in all, this looked like a very time-consuming and stressful activity and the RoI (Return on Investment) didn't appear that appealing to Maggu. So, he decided to brainstorm on Arranged Marriage now. (Again in his calculative mind) "hmm...Well, for this too, I've to search for a suitable bride. Here again, finding such a suitable match isn't going to be any easier, given the number of constraints that come into picture such as religion, caste, horoscope, education, career, looks, family background, etc. The bright side in this is that my parents would be helping me in finding the suitable match and my strong academics and career would play a valuable role. But then there are certain open questions such as how can I decide to spend the rest of my life with a person in just a couple of meetings? What if my parent's choice and my choice are way too different? What if I'm not able to find the kind of a girl I've in my mind? What if our frequencies do not match after marriage?...and so on..."
These questions created chaos in Maggu's otherwise sharp mind. Evidently, there was no clear winner. As the time was passing, his anxiety and confusion levels kept increasing. Maggu started to have a feeling that he was too late into the game and should have delved into this issue much earlier. Such was the intensity of this pandemonium that Maggu went into depression and his performance at work took a hit too. Amidst all of this confusedness, forget about the resolution of the issue, all he could come up with were more and more questions: What's the use of my IIT-IIM qualification if I haven't found a girl to marry yet? Why did parents keep telling me not to mingle with girls and rather concentrate on studies? Are my non-IIT/non-IIM friends much happier than I am, even though I've toiled a zillion times more than they have done so far? Why didn't they have a course in college on getting girl-friends which I could have topped and not be in this situation? What went wrong?
And this was the first time Maggu felt in his life that he had failed in something. He realized that there are many other important things in life than studies and career. He also realized that certain things in life can't be solved even by the best analytical minds; such matters are better left to the heart to deal with.
Disclaimer: All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This post was written for the IndiBlogger contest on LoveYaArrange.
