The Heart Is a Shifting Sea

The Heart Is a Shifting Sea
Author: Elizabeth Flock
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 406
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0062456504

Winner of the Silver Nautilus Award for Journalism & Investigative Reporting "A book that truly is impossible to put down.”—Washington Post "This remarkable debut is so deeply reported, elegantly written, and profoundly transporting that it reads like a novel you can’t put down. It’s both a nuanced and intimate evocation of Indian culture, and a provocative and exciting meditation on marriage itself."—Katie Roiphe, author of The Violet Hour In the vein of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an intimate, deeply reported and revelatory examination of love, marriage, and the state of modern India—as witnessed through the lives of three very different couples in today’s Mumbai. In twenty-first-century India, tradition is colliding with Western culture, a clash that touches the lives of everyday Indians from the wealthiest to the poorest. While ethnicity, class, and religion are influencing the nation’s development, so too are pop culture and technology—an uneasy fusion whose impact is most evident in the institution of marriage. The Heart Is a Shifting Sea introduces three couples whose relationships illuminate these sweeping cultural shifts in dramatic ways: Veer and Maya, a forward-thinking professional couple whose union is tested by Maya’s desire for independence; Shahzad and Sabeena, whose desperation for a child becomes entwined with the changing face of Islam; and Ashok and Parvati, whose arranged marriage, made possible by an online matchmaker, blossoms into true love. Though these three middle-class couples are at different stages in their lives and come from diverse religious backgrounds, their stories build on one another to present a layered, nuanced, and fascinating mosaic of the universal challenges, possibilities, and promise of matrimony in its present state. Elizabeth Flock has observed the evolving state of India from inside Mumbai, its largest metropolis. She spent close to a decade getting to know these couples—listening to their stories and living in their homes, where she was privy to countless moments of marital joy, inevitable frustration, dramatic upheaval, and whispered confessions and secrets. The result is a phenomenal feat of reportage that is both an enthralling portrait of a nation in the midst of transition and an unforgettable look at the universal mysteries of love and marriage that connect us all.

Love and Marriage

Love and Marriage
Author: Serena Nanda
Publisher: Waveland Press
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2018-12-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478638826

Cultural anthropologist Serena Nanda mines a wide range of ethnographic research to examine the patterns of love, marriage, sexuality, and family unique to eight cultures around the world. After reviewing changing patterns in the United States, readers are taken to China, India, Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, Nigeria, the South Pacific, and Nepal to explore traditions and transformations and the intertwining dynamics of kinship, class, politics, religion, and gender roles in love and marriage. An additional chapter traces the diversity of LGBTQ relationships, with contemporary examples drawn from the US, Indonesia, and India. A valuable summary chapter features a brief analysis of similar and different cultural configurations. Nanda’s ethnographically rich examples and fresh perspective will challenge readers to understand that their own culture is not natural or superior but rather just one of many possibilities adapted to specific environments and subject to changes.

Marriage Meetings for Lasting Love

Marriage Meetings for Lasting Love
Author: Marcia Naomi Berger
Publisher: New World Library
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2014-01-15
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 1608682242

Most couples — because they watch so many of their peers divorce and are themselves the products of failed marriages — don't have many successful long-term-relationship role models. Parenting and communication issues are perennial, while some challenges, like increasingly 24-7 work lives and economic hardships, mark the current decade. Despite all this, psychotherapist and clinical social worker Marcia Naomi Berger asserts that most couples can make love last — they just need to learn how. Berger answers this need with a deceptively simple prescription: have an interruption-free thirty-minute (or even shorter) meeting each week and follow an agenda that includes the kind of appreciation and planning for fun that foster intimacy and pave the way for collaborative conflict resolution. Berger has refined these techniques while working with hundreds of couples — with results that are both practical and profound.

India in Love

India in Love
Author: Ira Trivedi
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Total Pages: 428
Release: 2014
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9789382277620

A ground-breaking look at the sexual revolution that is beginning to sweep through urban India. The National Bestseller India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st Century is a ground-breaking look at the sexual revolution that is starting to sweep through urban India. Bestselling author Ira Trivedi travelled from Shilling in the northeast to Chennai in the south, Konark in the east to Mumbai in the west and over a dozen other cities and towns in order to gain unprecedented insights into changing sexual habits, marriage and love everywhere in the country. The book explores the mating habits of young Indians on college campuses and in offices, examines the new face of Indian pornography and prostitution, probes India's gay revolution and delves into history, economics and sociology to try and understand how the nation that gave the world the Kamasutra could have become a closed, repressed society with a shockingly high incidence of rape and violence against women the dark underside to the greater sexual freedom that men and women in our cities have begun to enjoy today. Trivedi goes deep into one of the most enduring institutions of Indian society marriage and investigates how it is faring in modern times. She interviews marriage brokers, astrologers, lawyers, relationship counsellors, 'love commandos', parents and nervous young brides and grooms, amongst others, to present a nuanced picture of the state of marriage in the country. She discovers that love marriages are skyrocketing and even the age-old arranged marriage is undergoing a transformation. Also on the rise are divorces, extra-marital affairs, open marriages, live-in-relationships and the like. Supporting her eye-opening reportage with hundreds of interviews, detailed research, authoritative published surveys and discussions with experts on various aspects of sexuality and marriage, Trivedi has written a book that is often startling, sometimes controversial, but is always entertaining and original.

Love in the Time of Affluenza

Love in the Time of Affluenza
Author: Shunali Khullar Shroff
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2019-07-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9386826054

“He never wants to touch me any longer, Natasha. It's like he's impotent or something.” “That's not impotence, that's just what being married is like!” Raising three beautiful children in her beautiful Bombay home with her aristocratic husband of 15 years – every bit the prince you read about in fairy tales – Natasha has it all. But when her closest friend drops the bombshell that she's isn't entirely fulfilled by her family and is having an affair, Natasha begins to ask some difficult questions about her own seemingly perfect life. From the bestselling author Shunali Shroff comes a novel about being a wife, a mother and the woman you used to be before that. Featured in 50 Books to Look Out for in 2019 by Huffington Post

Finding an Indian Bride

Finding an Indian Bride
Author: Vinay Kallat
Publisher:
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2017-07-30
Genre:
ISBN: 9781521857274

The story is inspired by real life events of an Indian guy, who is stuck in the process of an arranged marriage. It all started on his 24th birthday, when his mother realized that her youngest son had all grown up and was ready for a marriage. This is the story of how he meets up with various interesting girls, and the anxiety he feels meeting the girl's family for the first time. The author also depicts the insecurities and the heartbreak of his life, while trying to find a bride. His complicated political work life entangled with a love story that would compel you to fall in love with the main character and at the same time feel sorry for him. How situations over power his logical reasoning at times. This book is for those who want to have a laugh at the awkward situation author is put through by his mother, to meet up random girls over a cup of coffee.The author also depicts the various complex issues of his life and how those things add up to whom he gets married to. The story involves various characters in author's real life that change the way he thinks about marriage. The emotional turmoil that would make you feel his pain. This book also provides some of the vital information and processes involved in an arranged marriage. It also shows the desperation of the author to get out of an arranged marriage and his mother's perseverance to overcome it. This book would take you into a roller coaster ride depicting his every emotion, which ultimately affects his decisions. Societal pressure and beautiful distractions in his life, accompanied with his own insecurities makes it harder for him to decide what is the best choice for him. It is an internal fight between his brain to make a practical decision and his heart to make an emotional decision. This is his mother's proposal to get her son married to a girl she chooses for him. You have to read his story to know what he finally decides and would he do an arranged marriage or is there any more surprises that life has in store for him.The author has depicted every emotion of his life in an exciting Bollywood style writing with lots of humor. The motive behind writing this book was to showcase the awkward moments and the thought process a contestant in an arranged marriage goes through. The romantic and dramatized real life events of the author's life is not the only take away from this book. Author cleverly embeds the following points in his book:What someone feels while visiting a girl's family for the first time?What awkward questions one has to face in the meet up?Does fate really decide your destiny?Is it possible to fall in love with a person you have just met?What would you do if you have two good proposals in hand? What complicated process one has to go through for an arranged marriage?Which is better a practical or an emotional approach towards marriage?What role family plays in an arranged marriage?Is arranged marriage only about fulfilling certain criteria?What is the power of love and fear?Can you go to any extent to fulfill your dream?Does Love thrive in an arranged Marriage?Do you believe in love at first sight? Meet you at chapter one.

Love After Marriage

Love After Marriage
Author: Bhagya Chandra
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014-01-24
Genre:
ISBN: 9781495314681

Revised and re-edited, September 2014 Compassionate and deeply emotional, 'Love after Marriage' is a contemporary love story about Deepak and Roshni, a young couple flung together in a traditional arranged marriage. The story authenticates the concept of an arranged marriage, which has prevailed in India for several hundred years. It centers on the conviction that husband and wife, strangers at the time of marriage, can develop a stronger love if they are honest and committed to each other. In Love after Marriage, Deepak and Roshni embark on the timeless journey of marriage, only to discover that it's not quite as simple as they expected. What follows is an exploration of understanding and compromise, weaving a tapestry of love and affection that lasts longer and grows stronger over time.

Love Will Follow

Love Will Follow
Author: Shaifali Sandhya
Publisher:
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2009
Genre: India
ISBN: 9788184000429

The Indian marriage is burning. In this groundbreaking study-the first clinical andcultural portrait of its kind-Shaifali Sandhya explores the intimate lives of middle class Indianhusbands and wives living in India and abroad and looks at what is causing this breakdown.Interviewing countless couples, using current research, and looking deeply at the key areas inrelationships which cause conflict-sex, money, family-she draws a devastating picture of themodern Indian marriage. " 80% of divorces are initiated by women. " 94% of Indian couples say they are happy in their relationships but a majority of themsay they would not marry the same person if they had a chance to replay their lives. " 1/3rd of Indian couples say they are dissatisfied with their sex life. " Most couples call the early years of their marriage the honeymoon years . For Indiancouples they are usually the worst. Hardhitting, eyeopening, and completely riveting, Love will Follow takes you into the hearts andminds of Indian men and women. Full of moving stories, fascinating statistics, and insights, it couldchange the way you see your relationship-and your life.

No Presents Please

No Presents Please
Author: Jayant Kaikini
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 138
Release: 2020-07-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 194822691X

For readers of Jhumpa Lahiri and Rohinton Mistry, as well as Lorrie Moore and George Saunders, here are stories on the pathos and comedy of small–town migrants struggling to build a life in the big city, with the dream world of Bollywood never far away. Jayant Kaikini’s gaze takes in the people in the corners of Mumbai—a bus driver who, denied vacation time, steals the bus to travel home; a slum dweller who catches cats and sells them for pharmaceutical testing; a father at his wit’s end who takes his mischievous son to a reform institution. In this metropolis, those who seek find epiphanies in dark movie theaters, the jostle of local trains, and even in roadside keychains and lost thermos flasks. Here, in the shade of an unfinished overpass, a factory–worker and her boyfriend browse wedding invitations bearing wealthy couples’ affectations—”no presents please”—and look once more at what they own. Translated from the Kannada by Tejaswini Niranjana, these resonant stories, recently awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, take us to photo framers, flower markets, and Irani cafes, revealing a city trading in fantasies while its strivers, eating once a day and sleeping ten to a room, hold secret ambitions close.