We can’t decide how other people should live
There is an age for everything in India - an unofficial timeline for life events - determined first by family and then reinforced by society. Complete studies by this age. Get married by that age. Reproduce, settle and retire by a certain time. And then stop wanting anything in life, because you are theoretically past the stage of desiring anything material and sensorial, most of all love.
In 2023, when Ashish Vidyarthi married a woman roughly ten years younger than him, he was massively trolled for seeking love at an age when people should turn monks and go to the Himalayas. Recently, when a senior couple in Kerala decided to unite after years of loneliness following their spouses’ deaths, they were targeted on social media for reviving a decades-old bond. It was a wedding arranged by their children, yet there was discomfort among those who felt they were improper. Every time such a deviation occurs, culture vultures question people’s right to happiness beyond prescribed norms.
Who sets the rules for what individuals do in their private lives? Believe it or not, we do. We, as an amorphous entity, keep a tab on others and condemn them because they do things differently. We let the green-eyed monster grow when we find their lives better than ours. The jealousy plays out as toxic reactions and personal attacks that sometimes turn into honour crimes.
Even as we are code-switching superficially and shifting our external lives to include newer pleasures, our belief systems remain antiquated. Our core is intolerant towards the liberty of others, and we go after those who write their own destinies, defying what we consider right. It is absurd that we are more interested in putting other people’s lives in order when our own are in a shambles. Such is our hypocrisy and our claim to moral authority. Instead of evolving with expanded worldviews, we limit ourselves to inherited dogmatism.
Here is the irony: we perpetrate the bigotry and we endure it too. We also let these old social scripts play out by following them without questioning. We often give in to pressures emerging from collective assumptions of right and wrong. Societies created rules for shared benefit — to stabilise institutions of governance, family and community. Without norms, populations would descend into anarchy. These structures were built to ensure smooth human experience. The problem begins when rules become moral absolutes applied without context. When the structure defines virtue without considering lived reality, rules become shackles. Our right to exist in a manner that fulfils us is jettisoned for no fault of ours.
What we are doing is freezing human liberty by dictating templates of how others should live. We have no authority to question how people expend their time on earth. We are nobody to tell them when, how and whom they should love, marry or divorce; whether they want to start a family; how to dress, eat or spend money. We cannot box people into narrow confines of subjective beliefs and control their happiness.
Our orthodoxy is for us to follow and not to impose on those who choose differently. Let us not create hell for others by shaming those not aligned with our views. There is only one simple creed in life that guarantees happiness for all — live and let live.
The writer is a Dubai-based author, columnist, independent journalist and children’s writing coach; views are personal
