Shaadi aka wedding aka vivah......

Shaadi is a process of connecting two souls for life.The connection which has been made by god in heaven and is made formal on earth by humans.

Exploration of the answer to –What is Marriage?

It is something their parents did. It is something your parent’s worry you might not do. This something is called by the name of Marriage.

Speaking in a social language, Marriage is a union between a man and women which gives the couple a legal, religious and social acceptance for living together and have a legitimate sexual relationship. In other words it allows them to have a lot of rights, as observed by the renounced anthropologist Edmund Leach.

Marriages are observed in almost all civilized communities of the world. There are such heterogeneous types of ethnologically different societies in this world that it is impossible to give definition of marriage in terms of rituals and customs. The definition of marriage between a man and a woman doesn’t stand corrected in today’s changing life trends. For example in 1930s Nuer in eastern Africa performed conjugal relationships and “ghost marriages”. A “Ghost marriage” being a marriage between the women whose husband dies without any heir and in order to give an inheritor to the family she marriages one of his brothers.

So, what is marriage?

Interestingly there are several faces of this term .One side of the dice is a legal monogamous heterosexual relationship which gives the couple right to have a legitimate sexuality and another being practicing of polygamy in which a man has several wives or a women has several husbands. Indian history shouts out examples of each category.

In some jurisdictions the marriage of same sex is acceptable and legal.

Whatever be the denotation of this question but my grandmother told me that it is a step towards starting a new life with a life-long partner with whom you conceive children and nurture them together in order to have a family of your own.

With the ever changing life–styles and introduction of the live-in relationships the institution of marriage is under constant threat of collapsing.

Even after so much research it is impossible to give a one line answer to the question- what is marriage?