The German philosopher Goethe said that “Love is an ideal thing, marriage is a real thing and a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished.” Now, in a way, every married couple is a ‘Karmic Couple’ since marriage is the biggest Karmic-connection to settle trials and dues of past births. However, today an ordinary marriage is – well, just another marriage. It’s only the Romeos and Juliets of high society, the Marc Anthonys and Cleopatras of the corporate world or the Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidmans of Hollywood and various Bollywood stars that keep us glued to their love lives, thanks to the overwhelming media-glare!
When celebrities like Anushka and Virat, Dipika and Ranveer or Priyanka and Nick Jonas tie the knot, the public is privy to the smallest detail of how they burnt up crores of rupees in a spectacular show of money in a few days’ time. Everything is put under the media-microscope to feed the perverted curiosity of the public who lap it up with great relish.
Now, there are two types of people – those who wish well to the much-publicised fairytale qualities of love (like you and me) and those jealous-types who almost wait with bated breath for the marriage to end with all sorts of arguments like Anushka is an actress and Virat is a cricketer, so maybe they’ll lead seperate, busy lives and soon divorce. Or Dipika and Ranveer are two different people. She’s an introvert and he’s a super extrovert, so the marriage may run into difficulties. Or again, the nasty one about Nick Jonas being 14 years younger to Priyanka and Malaika Arora being 15 years older to Arjun Kapoor. Somehow, everyone feels that a younger man gets tired and fed up of an older woman, that he wants an arm-candy and a mother-figure for his public-image but isn’t that their business and not yours? In fact, several marriages with a reverse age-gap have been successful. And God forbid if such a celebrity marriage ends in a divorce, many people race to be the first to say ‘I told you so’.
We livr in a world where couples wilt more quickly than flowers and we have witnessed fairy-tale celebrity unions becoming Greek tragedies. Media persons who misuse the Saraswati in their pen to write cheap gossip columns, become experts on the lives, marriages and divorces of public figures. And what about those who read these columns? Well, there is great satisfaction to be found in distancing ourselves and thinking, “Thank God, our (ordinary) marriage is safe!”
No doubt, with love, only time will tell. Over centuries, love stories have gone from ordinary day to day relationships into the stuff of legends – Emperor Shah Jahan fell madly in love with a married woman (Mumtaz Mahal) and had her husband killed in order to wed her himself. Mumtaz died giving birth to their fourteenth child and Shah Jahan fell into a deep depression during which period he built the Taj Mahal. He spent the remaining years of his life imprisoned by his son (at Agra Fort) staring at the reflection of the enormous monument to his beloved through a small mirror and died with it in his hand. His son entombed him alongside Mumtaz in the giant white-domed tomb. So you see, no one escapes his Karma, not even the self-proclaimed ‘King of the World’ (Shah-Jahan).
Inevitably, most married couples have difference of opinions and develop a squabble-Karma, for which they have routine scripts. They carry out these scripts almost on autopilot. If the relationship is solid, the marriage survives. If it’s shaky, the arguments become destructive. Unfortunately, in the case of a celebrity marriage, everything is exposed to the public-domain.
Ordinary marriages have a better chance to survive because “what’s between us stays between us” and “what happens inside the house, stays inside the house”. So you see, these so-called high profile fairy-tale weddings are good from far but far from good. There’s so much all-round pressure that builds up over the years and then one day, the marriage explodes like a pressure-cooker.
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