From: [email-masked] (Subbarao Kambhampati)
Date: Sat, 29 Jun 91 15:17:52 PDT

Path: leland.Stanford.EDU!stanford.edu!agate!apple!usc!sdd.hp.com!news.cs.indiana.edu!ux1.cso.uiuc.edu!altair!murphy
>From: murphy@altair (Michael L. Murphy)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.indian
Subject: Re: marrying in the old country [Important Consumer advice included]
Summary: no woman is merchandise.
Keywords: marriage, chauvenism, point-of-view
Message-ID: <[email-masked]>
Date: 29 Jun 91 21:29:28 GMT
References: <[email-masked]> <[email-masked]> <[email-masked]>
Sender: [email-masked] (News)
Followup-To: soc.culture.indian
Organization: Math Dept., University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign
Lines: 79

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (PhD-in-Training) writes:
>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Subbarao Kambhampati) writes:
>>In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (PhD-in-Training) writes:
>>
>>>I am a bengali who has grown up in the US and I am thinking of
>>>marrying a girl from India (arranged) and bringing her here.  Is
>>>there anyone who has done this?  The man should have either grown
>>>up in the States or lived over 10 years here.  I am concerned
>>>about adjustment, etc.
>>
>> * clever, but perhaps too esoteric, sarcasm by Subbarao deleted *

What Subbarao has said in the form of sarcasm, I will say bluntly.
Your article makes India sound like some sort of "wife market", and
makes the woman sound like "merchandise".  Don't you think that
a woman is much more than this, that love and marriage are not
merely goals to be obtained, but a freely chosen commitment between
two people?

>I congratulate you, not only on your mockery of the institution of
>marriage, but also on denegrating women down to where they belong.
>Tell me, did you conceive of the idea of equating women with objects to
>be possessed and manipulated by men, all on your own?  As another
>poster commented, "What a fresh idea" this is!

What Subbarao has done is to take your own ideas on the position of
a woman in a marriage, and magnify them with sarcasm so that even you can
see the chauvenistic overtones.  You, sir, are the one who is treating
a woman as an object.  Mr. Kambhampati is merely pointing this out to
you.  The feeble lament that this is a way of life for men in India
is no excuse for you.  You have been raised in the US, and pardon me
for sounding patronizing, but you should know better.

Tell me, when you obtain your Ph.D., would you like a woman from a foreign
country to say "Ah, now Mr. Mukherjee would make a suitable husband" and
proceed to arrange a marriage with you, and "import" you?  Are you
beginning to understand why this attitude is wrong?

>Thanks to you, I now realize that marrying the right girl is simply
>acquiring the correct brand of equipment and getting a satisfactory
>performance out of it.

What more do you think of a woman than this, if you can ask what you
asked?  It is obvious that you would never place a woman so "obtained"
on a level equal to yourself, and your marriage would never be
"satisfactory", to yourself or to her.

****
The reason I responded to this article, I, who am neither Indian nor
have been to India, is this:  My girlfriend, whom I have been dating
for 10 months, came to the US from India in June '90.  She had lived
in India all her life, but very quickly adjusted to customs here (as
can be witnessed in the fact that we started dating in August.)  She
has had Indian male admirers, both here and in India - but she wanted
more.  She wants knowledge, she wants adventure, but most of all, she
wants to be her own person, and not merely "Mr. So-and-so's wife".

I fell in love with her because of her beauty and strength.  She fell
in love with me, well, I have a hard time guessing why sometimes, but
I think it was a combination of persistence :) and the fact that I
was perhaps the first man to treat her as a person, and not merely as
an "Indian female", not even as an "Indian female who has been to the
US to study".  I was unaware of these stereotypes when I met her, and so
I fell in love with her, not with an image of what she was supposed to
be, as so many other boys had done with her.  And she loved me back,
because finally, here was someone who saw her, and not the stereotype.

I ask two things of the people reading this.  First, examine your own
views of the world around you.  Are you seeing people as people, or as
pre-formed images?  Put yourself in their place, and by doing so, you
may understand their positions better.  Second, wish Anuradha and me the
best of luck - she is in India for the summer, and her family and
friends are just now finding out how close we really are.  I hope that
I am accepted in India - the next time she goes there, I go with her.
--
+-Murphy's law: The amount of bugs present-+-Michael Murphy--------------+
| in your program is directly proportional | [email-masked] |
| to the time you've spent working on the  | [email-masked]    |
+-damn thing.------------------------------+-----------------------------+