They met, by chance. Their eyes met in no time. Visual communication yielded place to some stray verbal shorts. The shots were heard more at the giving end than the receiving end. The seeds of love were laid in a fertile soil. These preliminaries, happening in a jiffy as it were, ended in the two bodies making electrifying, high-voltage contact. The elders too entered the scene. They, at the start of this column, were one of the Boy-Girl duo, in countless numbers all over the world, Mysuru being a mere spec on the canvas. The storyline narrated by writers decades ago often ended like this. “They were married and lived happily ever after.” The grateful society of those days, unlike now, looked at the “Happily Married” twosome, with consummate glee, as “Made for each other.” Even the world of trade and commerce drew heavily on the seamless slogan to allure their patrons seeking fashionable products — textiles, cosmetics…

Both epics and historical records of the land present many episodes of divine beings in the former case and legends in the latter category featuring couples made for each other. Often sidelining instances of extramarital relationships such as the case of the Lord of Heaven, Indra, in addition to rishis possessing impeccable character until the day the that reputation came crashing.

Old-timers in Mysuru can recall the days when it was common to hear their peers sharing their boundless delight while talking about sons living with their wives creating a most blissful family ambience, now gone into fiction mode. The factors disrupting that “Made-for-each-other” magic may be at variance between families in urban spaces and rural parts, but the end result is there for all to see. One is prompted to observe that there are more reasons to sustaining harmony between couples, even newly-weds, than to allow the bonding break off. Economic independence of the female of the couple is often blamed as that predominant factor. But, there is more than meets the eye in our times, particularly disregard for the norms set by people of the past for that happily-married-ever-after end to the storyline.

Even as the “Made-for-each-other” model has become brittle and fractured, the model has persisted in the country in myriad spheres. One cannot but highlight two such: a) the easily-fooled electorate and the elected netas and b) lawlessness and the people at large, is glaring examples of “Made-for-each-other” model. The caption to this column owes to the city-based oncologist, who in the course of his talk before a captive audience concluded saying “Smoking and cancer are made-for-each-other.” Smokers couldn’t care less.