Latest
07:47 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
February 28, 2013
This is an awesome story. It is also true. Happened recently. There is this family whose son received a proposal for marriage through a matrimonial ad. Like so far, so good. Now, the son and dad get through to the girl’s people and project themselves up as big businessmen with a roaring bottom line. A meeting is set up. Now the girl’s parents are actually wealthy and they agree to arrive in this city where the boy resides and stay a night.
Son and dad now go on the town. They hire one Merc, a Beamer and an Audi and then take a five bedroom fully furnished house in an upscale locality on hire. They park the cars outside the gate and place two Gurkha guards who are also on a week’s contract. A retinue of male and female help are also enlisted from a hiring company and trained over three days to conduct themselves in a specific fashion. A fair amount of money is spent on clothes and crockery and cutlery and linen are taken on loan from a restaurant. A little personal bric a brac from the house they live and an on-loan 42 inch LED are placed in the guest room and an investment made on a decoder in case the girl’s parents want to see a movie.
Since the weather is pleasant a set of garden chairs and a table are placed in the strip of green and all is ready to welcome the aspirants from the girl’s side. On the day two cars are sent to the airport to receive them with Dad and Mum in tow while sonny boy stays home and looks into the last minute details.
The family arrives and there is much bon homie and togetherness and a splendid dinner is served by the battalion of waiters and the two fathers talk of the slipping rupee and the higher taxes and how tough it is to make a million and the boy likes the girl and vice versa and they have an enjoyable breakfast the next morning and both sides are delighted to see the youngsters getting on and they tell each other, after all, what we want is our children’s happiness, no more, no less which is fine and then off they go to the airport with much waving of hands and promises to get back soon.
Five days later they call on the mobile and make the official offer. Yes, they want their little girl to marry the boy. By now the boy’s side have dismantled their little deception and driven back in their old car to the modest two bedroom third floor apartment they have in a lower middle class colony with just a part time maid to help.
Dad now does the whole thing again for the wedding. He flies business class to the girl’s city and fixes all the arrangements including the fact that being a decent cove the people coming from their side will only be a hundred odd. As for a dowry, absolutely not, no, no, no.
Okay, I’ll cut to the chase. They get married and the girl discovers her knight in shining armour has no dough, not a penny, zilch. So I tell the person who is relating the story, come on, mister, didn’t they do any due diligence, how could they not have checked on the boy, after all, they were giving their daughter to this family, surely one meeting can’t have been enough, surely there was someone who knew both sides and would have come out with the truth.
Unbelievable. Are parents so blind? Is the keenness to get the girl married so overwhelming that you see only what you want to see?
He grins. They live down the road, he says, her dad bought them a flat and a car and he has got the boy started on a business by giving him seed money, I’ll introduce you.
And how do you know all this?
I got them the cars, the boy is my classmate...you see, I was part of the deception.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and a former Editor of Khaleej Times, Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
If my call is so important to them, why don’t they answer it for 22 minutes?
How come when I want to, but something specific online is the only item out of stock.
When I get into a queue or lane going fast, the moment I get in, it becomes the slowest and refuses to budge.
Read more... | Archives