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Book Name:Courtship & Marriage: A Guide for Indian Couples. by Dr Vijay Nagaswami Publisher: Penguin India Price: Rs 200

SCOTCH, NOT MARRIAGE, ON THE ROCKS

Marriage is the one thing that everyone has an opinion about. Songs sing it as inevitable. It ends novels, comedies and films - the perfect ending with the couple walking into the sunset to live happily ever after. People who don't get married wish they had and people who marry wish they hadn't. Most of it of course is because a wedding gets families, friends and relatives into a perfect frenzy of organising, shopping and dressing up. Everyone gets involved in a wedding because there are so many things to do, so much fun to be had, usually at the expense of the two people for whom the whole occasion is being staged.

Grandmothers plot at wedding sari sales and estimate the jewellery to be given and received. Relatives count the days and the changes of clothing. If the family is traditional and determined to extract the last ounce of ceremony from the occasion, there are at least four or five dress up days- not to mention all the clothes that have to be bought for the new in-laws and the bride. In fact, while the father of the bride is busy interviewing caterers and decorators, the rest of the family is almost permanently in residence at the family jeweller's or sari merchant's, wading through stones and tissues and ticking off the lists.

And after the laughter and the shouting dies and everyone has eaten and drunk and dressed up to their heart's content, the two people are left together to figure out how to spend the rest of their lives, in what seems like a sudden silence.

Abroad most people make their own decisions about whether to marry or not to marry. In India, you have the option of getting it arranged for you so you don't have to go to all the trouble of finding the right person by yourself. Which adds to the complications because after everyone has finished arranging it for you, you have to sit down with that person you married and work out some ground rules for living together. Complicated even more by the fact that you might be expected to live with a new set of in laws as well.

It's not easy - a lot of people in fact have taken to opting out of it after a few years with excuses or with rage. The divorce rate is spiralling in India. Of course, none of this is to say that marriage is not a wonderful institution. When it works, it brings great benefits to adults and their children.

Which brings us to the book in question: Courtship & Marriage: A Guide for Indian Couples by Vijay Nagaswami. In his introduction, Dr. Nagaswami, a psychiatrist by training and a marriage counsellor by choice, writes, ``Have your scotch on the rocks, not your marriage''.

The stated intention of Courtship & Marriage is to ``provide an understanding of what is happening in your relationship... There are unconscious factors..., which, if unresolved, present seemingly insurmountable obstacles to our growth. We must acknowledge their presence, understand their origins and make conscious effort to eliminate them. To do this we need tools with which we can start debugging ourselves. This book provides you with the tools...''

The book is divided into episodes in a marriage - the engagement, the first quarrel, problems with in-laws - all described in simple story form. A couple's problems as they get to know each other better - and the better they get to know each other, the deeper the problems because, Dr Nagaswami says, the closer we come to commitment and understanding, the more our subconscious struggles to throw up barriers.

In between the episodes come the tools to help you through the problems, checklists of questions that you should ask yourself when you run into those cul de sacs that a marriage throws up. The language is simple and informal which makes reading easy and the stories are easily related to: Ambika's problems with her mother in law -which hide her own unresolved problems with her mother; her husband Amar's problems with his wife's control games.

The tools offer a tacit assurance that they will work to make the reader a better person, provided one is brutally honest with oneself and one's spouse and is willing to re-invest one's emotion (he calls it secondary commitment) in the relationship. There are no easy solutions and no suggestions that following the book blindly will lead to a happy ending. Just a promise that if the guidelines are followed then there is a chance that everything might work out.

Vijay Nagaswami says, he wrote Courtship & Marriage: A Guide for Indian Couples because ``The novel I wrote is loaded with non-fictional material on this theme. So the theme deserved a separate focus, because the books in India tend to pivot on sex for marital happiness. Books on relationships exist in the West but many are not reader-friendly.'' So here it is, a reader friendly guide that deserves to be taken seriously because the advice that it offers is invaluable.

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