Swayamvar

Swayamvar or swayamvaram is an ancient Indian custom mentioned in the Ramayana and Mahabharatha (and no longer in practice in modern India). Nowadays swayamvar is taken to mean wedding. 

It is a custom by which a bride-to-be (mostly a princess) selects her husband. Usually an auspicious date is fixed. On that day, all eligible men from far and wide come to the country of the princess. The eligible men can range from kings and princes to paupers. The princess then goes around inspecting them (much like the Head of the State who inspects the guard of honor) with a flower garland in her hand. When she reaches the man who catches her fancy, she puts the garland on him and they are supposedly married. That's all! So simple! There can be variations also. The King can put some criteria for deciding the abilities and skills of his daughter's husband. I think that was like a preliminary test to sift the husk. For example, Draupadi's father had put the criteria that he would give his daughter's hand to only that man who could shoot his arrow correctly at the eye of a rotating fish which was perched high in the centre of the royal court and that too only by looking at the image of the fish in a pond . (Talk about shooting the semen in the right direction!).

Sometimes if the princess is already in love with a young man, then the swayamvar makes it a lot easier for her.  (Yes, even in ancient India girls had to be secretive about her love affairs).

That was the age of the princes and princesses.

Never ever fairy tales

It’s a good decision by Disney, to stop producing any more princess movies. These fairy tale movies and stories become so much a part of children that they won't outgrow them. And I am one of such kids who never grew up.

 

I still live in these fairy tales; they open a parallel universe to me, the universe where everything is perfect and happy. I fantasize about a fairy godmother who would turn me into a beautiful princess, about a valiant Prince in shining armor who would come riding on a white horse waving his sword, about the beautiful poor damsel whom the prince will fall in love with and live happily ever after. Of course, the fantasy has many variations. Sometimes the prince would be the hottest movie star, or the hunkiest footballer, or the new sexy singer or even the most eligible prince around - Prince William. I would be meeting him sometimes in Paris, or in London or in the States or even in India. We would fall in love and manage to keep our affair from the paparazzi and the rest of the world. He proposes and we live happily ever after. And now that Prince William has proposed to Kate Middleton, one would expect these fantasies to die off. But the brain is really an amazing thing. It refuses to kill them. It modifies the fantasy, making the Prince fall in love with me in spite of his commitment (like the prince who falls in love with the mermaid despite being engaged to someone else). Maybe this is what the scientists call the plasticity of human brain.

When we are children the fairy tales are quite an enjoyable reading. Nice things happening to nice people. Bad things happen to evil people. As we grow up we believe the same, we expect the same, and at last we begin to hope for the same.  But the difficult thing is, in a fairy tale we reach the end of the story within minutes. Like sleeping beauty, where the prince discovers her after many years. The princess eats the apple and falls asleep. The storyteller has only one thing to say, "Then many years later, a prince comes…" In real life, the many years would actually take many years. It’s a long wait. Even while waiting, you are unsure. Only if we could know the end sooner.

It takes quite some time to realise that our life is not a fairy tale, that our life cannot be a fairy tale. Even after the realisation, many of us still hope for a fairy tale to happen in our lives.

I am sure there would be many girls like me who at some point in their life believed she would be a princess. I really wonder how the real life princesses felt when these fairy tales were read to them.