I’ve Lost That Feeling

As I finish my current contract and think about my next steps, I am doing my best to focus on goal planning.  I am thinking of where my life is today and where it is heading.  I need to do a head-to-the-grindstone job of life planning, which includes career, personal, living situation, and family priorities.  That can be simple or complex, mostly dependent on how much I want to prioritize my own needs versus those of family and others.

Unfortunately, I find myself having lost the feeling.  There are too many demands.  I have prioritized my family responsibilities at the expense of my career and personal life.  For the first time in years, I am “thinking” about this.  Yes, I did good for my family which I am happy about.  I now need to re-prioritize.  It is not too late yet, although it feels like it may be.

Professional Life – which industry do I want to work in?  Do I want to stay in information technology?  Do I want to go into education?  Is social entrepreneurship and perhaps the NGO space where I want to be?  Ideally, I would like to further my education, either by doing research or by doing an MBA.

Personal Life – I want to stabilize my life with the main goal of meeting someone to settle down with.  I want to make a good set of friends.  I want to buy a house and live in one city for the rest of my life, ideally, though at this point living in one city seems a remote possibility since I have not done that in years.  Where will that be?  India?  US?  New Delhi?  Bombay?  Boston?  California?  Marriage and stability are the key words.

Family Life – I want to be able to take care of my mother.  My sister is now married so I don’t have to worry about her.  How this will happen is tricky.  We are three siblings but the pressure has been on me.  How do we share it?

I have a list of almost half a dozen if not more business ideas, including many within the education sector itself.  There are many kinds of services I can provide if I decided to go into education.  I am very confident I can provide all of the services.  I have either done them before or am very familiar with them.  It is a matter of determining what I want to do.  I need to start by doing a survey of the market for each of these services to see which ones would be of most interest.  The key factor is not only availability of clients but also the level of income that can be generated.  I am deeply interested in all of these ideas so the passion component will naturally be there.

The thing that makes it tough to decide is that, while I want to focus on a niche, I could provide more than one service as part of the business.  So it’s the classic entrepreneurship struggle – what do I want to focus on, is there a market for it, how much can I earn from it?

Tags: motivation, life+planning, career+planning

Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Will there be a time when the terms “marriage” and “love marriage” will be synonymous in India?  Can I rely on meeting someone, spending time with her, falling in love, and getting married?  I sure hope that is a possibility.  I hope I am not deluding myself.  I prefer meeting a girl outside of an arranged marriage scenario.  This is mostly due to a desire to get to know someone before rather than after marriage although I could do the latter if I had to.  The other very practial issue, though of fluctuating importance, is that I am realizing with the extended family I interact with, it may not be possible to meet the kind of girl I would like to meet.  They simply may not be able to introduce me to her.

Most of my extended family has a circle that is different than who I am and who I am looking for.  This circle would follow a strict definition of arranged marriages.  The decision would be based on horoscopes matching and what not.  This is not a desirable route!  Not being able to count on appropriate introductions through family or the horoscope matching process being the preferred route, I am now shifting my focus to meeting someone on my own, while being open to the occassional introduction.  As I am finding out, meeting people in a new city and that city being New Delhi is easier said than done.

As I was talking to Rita (see my post “Marriages in the New India”), I started to wonder if I my approach to finding someone on my own is the right way to find a girl.  If love marriages are not working, then why should I be seeking one out?  Rita said “you don’t know someone until you live with them”.  I know this all too well (which is another post at another time).  She also said while dating “everyone puts their best foot forward”.  I found this notion interesting.  So let me talk about that.

Why would you want to put your best foot forward when you are dating?  I can imagine doing that early on in the relationship.  However, if the dating lasts for any extended period of time, say over 9 months, and you are seeing each other a few times a week, why (or how) would you not be yourself and let the good and the bad be shown?  Why would you not show your thinking, your feelings, your attitude, your perceptions, your quirks, your pet peeves, your strengths and your weaknesses?  Isn’t this what getting to know someone means?  Isn’t this the purpose of dating?  That, of course, is still not the same as living with a person day in and day out but I think the question is still valid at least to some level.

This discussion raised the question in my mind – is there something substantially different about dating relationships in the US and in India?  Do people approach it the same?  Are the behaviors and expectations the same?  Are their day-to-day interactions the same?  Or, at a different level altogether, is there something fundamentally separate at work – are people raised in the US equipped with a different mindset than people in India that makes the practice of dating incomparable?

So am I setting myself up for a gigantic fall by wanting to date someone here?  I am different than the people who Rita is talking about.  They were born and raised here.  I was born in India and raised in the US.  As Indian as I am, this has undoubtedly affected my thinking, my outlook, and my expectations of what should happen and will happen in a relationship.  I behave differently.  I see relationships differently (if not completely, at least partially).  I may even see the whole approach to dating differently, I don’t know.  I may expect the cues to be different.

Or does none of this matter?  Is the person more important?  Is the compatibility between her and me more important than any of these cultural differences?  I believe it is more important but by no means will it be true across the board in my interactions with a girl I may date in India.  There will surely be times when the cultural differences appear in different assumed understanding of behaviors, expectations, and attitudes.  And that’s the problem I fear.  Her and my expectations may be assumedly different and neither of us may know when and how they are different.

To go back to the original issue I was discussing, if love marriages are not functioning as well as arranged marriages, then what the heck am I thinking?  Or does it not matter because I am different and so any relationship I get into won’t be the same as a relationship between two people who were raised in India.

Now, at a level not directly relevant to me, but something that does affect me because one cannot discount one’s environment, why are love marriages not working?  How many people are similar to Rita’s friends?  How many have different experiences?  How are those experiences different?

I am barely at the tip of these issues so I cannot claim to know the reason(s) why love marriages may be less successful (anecdotely and thus far in time) in India than arranged ones.  I can take educated guesses, though, combining my estimation and understanding of things along with Rita’s comments.  Discussion to be continued in my next post.

Marriages in the New India

As part of my pursuit to meet new people here, I went out a few weeks ago with a friend from the US to watch the Indian Premier League (IPL) semi-finals.  A few other people were also there.  And I am happy to say I made a friend with whom I am now having some great conversations.  No, there is no option of a romantic relationship with this woman.  I expect us to be good platonic friends.  While the lack of finding a potential girlfriend is disappointing and the search continues, the result is positive in a city where I want to, more than anything, just meet good people.  That will lead to positive things happening.

It’s interesting how Rita (name changed to protect the innocent) and I started talking.  I called her to find out about another gal who had also come to the happy hour get-together.  It turns out her friend is married.  So there goes that.  I meet a cute girl and she turns out to be married.  But this gave Rita and I an opportunity to talk and we have been doing so regularly the past few days.

Rita had a love marriage five or six years back.  It didn’t work out and she had a divorce just two months ago.  She sounds very much at peace with it in the sense there don’t appear to be deep scars as a result of it.  In a recent conversation, Rita and I were talking about my responsibility towards my family.  I have financially supported my mother and sister the past few years.  I recently paid for my sister’s wedding (yes, the whole shabang, which would probably be a good set of posts to write about).  It’s not insignificant in that providing financial assistance has meant sacrificing my own life, my own standard of living in the US to below par, and my own professional and career plans (I suppose this would be a good post at some point also).  My obligations to my family have been full and complete – from their day to day living expenses to paying for my sister’s education to everything in between.  Rita found this interesting.  She complimented me stating that I was a “rare” individual who should be commended. 

As we diverged from one topic to another, we started talking about her friends’ marriages.  I was very intrigued by the discussion.  It gave me an understanding of issues I was not aware of.  Or, more accurately, it raised a whole host of questions for me personally in my quest for a lifelong partner in India.  These issues are clearly prevalent today.  They are in the minds of my generation men and women.  These are anecdotal insights from one individual and I am taking them as such for their instructional value.  They may or may not be an across-the-board reality though.

Rita made a few points:

• There are many examples of love marriages breaking up.
• The recent societal change of women working has led to financial disasters between couples.  Many are not equipped to deal with the change.
• The key issues, all linked, seem to be: the right women have over their incomes, what to do with the income of wives, who is expected to financially pay for a household, how are finances discussed and managed with two sources of income being more prevalent?
• Husbands and wives may not even be aware of their spouse’s salaries!
• Women want freedom to spend as they wish.  Husbands may be controlling the spending of their wives.  Wives may consider this as their husbands requiring approval which they do not appreciate.

Rita gave me examples of four couples.  One of them had what she considered a balanced approach to things.  Others did not and the situations varied in extremity.  I will discuss the points above separate posts.