Giving Advice

Giving advice can be an awfully tricky thing cause would you really want them to do what you are saying? Really? Its specially tricky when it is about helping someone ( eons younger) choose the right guy to marry and more so when you know that the advisee is hanging on to every word you are saying and her parents are later going to hang you for whatever you say to her.

What I really want to tell her is that “Hey you don’t need to get married just because your parents are now desperate to kick you out of their house”, but I cannot really tell her that, can I? Oh yes I can cause I have a big mouth and MY parents are not around and I am blissfully married. Ha ha I should add but don’t as I am a little sensible if not really known for being sensitive.

Now how does anyone decide whom to marry? This has been my research area since the time I had to face the dilemma myself. Earlier than that, I used to be like the rest of the junta and laugh around at all those going through the trauma and make their lives so miserable that getting married seemed to them a fairer deal than spending a minute more with me. Many a wedding made in heaven have been sped up by this humble catalyst.

Here today at the age of 25, Jigna is faced with the dilemma of whom to get married to and she has come to me for advice. Are you wondering why does anyone come to me for advice? It’s simple, cause I have fooled everyone into believing that I have a successful marriage and I am so good at it that even my husband believes that he is happy. See see .....

“Gut, your own gut will tell you when the time comes” is what I tell everyone, even though my own gut went somersaulting when the time came for me. But I can’t tell Jigna this. Now Jigna (name changed to preserve identity) comes from conservative Gujarati Jain family who have allowed her to get a professional degree and work just so she can be marketed well when the time comes. However Jigna’s poor fate collided with me one day when we took driving lessons together and the following 21 half hour sessions liberated the most smooth talking , free thinking rock chic babe I have ever known ( I’m talking about Jigna here, smooth is not my thing, I do caustic).

I asked her whether she had the guts to beat the system, stay afloat fighting a lone battle with her parents and the extended clan (Ku Klux was so passé) till she decides on her own. In reply, deafening silence. Well silence as an answer is generally accepted as a yes, but we are not discussing the general here, are we.

So I told Jigna to listen to her parents, meet the prospective grooms and finally let the destiny guide her (one can learn so much just watching trailers of Karan Johar movies).

Some may question if I was being sinister, plotting to eliminate the single status from earth as I had been untimely robbed of mine. Or if I was a chicken and backed out of telling what I really should have told Jigna? But I will have none of that, cause my dear I was simply giving advice. And the whole point of advice is that nobody takes it.