the other day, i got caught in a ‘discussion’ with a few people at the department (as i quite often do)… as usual the discussion revolved around relationships- what else would a bunch of young adults discuss… everyone at the department incidentally is a young adult, irrespective of their age.. somehow, no one at the department ever grows beyond youth except maybe get a few grey hair which most of them very successfully cover up…
back to the discussion… we started talking about live in relationships.. all very philosophically i might add… after all we are serious academicians not a bunch of non-scholarly socialites discussing things without a purpose, for that would have been a sin… so our scholarly discussion led us to wonder where our well cultured Indian society was headed with live-ins being tlaked of legalised.. of course almost all of us agreed it would be a decade before the parliament would ever get to pass such a bill… nevertheless, we continued to purposefully discuss (read argue) both sides of the coin… while a few of us strongly believed that we need to understand that marriage as an institution has lasted for centuries and there must be a reason for it to be so, and live-ins would lead to a large number of bastards being born and increasing the burden on women, and emotional turmoil of a break up in a live in would be too much with no family to fall back on etc etc… the other few (which may just mean I, me, myself) strongly supported live-ins and the legalisation.. we put forward the usual arguments of unnecessity of the ritual and the need to provide freedom of choice to people.. essentially saying that leave us alone and let us do what we want to do… i mean come on… what the hell is wrong with a bunch of people living together… and if they choose to have children, what’s your problem dude? and believe you me, an average woman would always know whose child she is mothering… so… if society needs to change and the young adults today need to be the generation in transition, i think we’re intelligenet enough to handle it.. of course i was told that we’re not emotionally mature and stuff… and i refused to back down and gave a bunch of counter arguments.. and as always, the purposeful discussions finished inconclusively coz we politely agreed to disagree… 🙂 i mean we’re really not out there to put our voices in other people’s throats, our we? so that was that…
that explains the title… living in.. but living out…? 🙂 ya well.. i came home and wondered if it wasn’t that i was so in favour of live ins coz that would be one good way of living out of my parental home??? i mean, maybe if live ins were allowed, we would also loosen up a bit on allowing young adults to live separately from their parents, even in the same city…