esotericvoyage.com

I recieved this response to my previous post.  It is long but well worth reading. 

I was reading your site articles and saw an article related to sex. If you have time, read some of what I have to say regarding that subject and marriage.

I have some of my friends and … [a relative] studying in… [the USA] and for sure they might be feeling the same way too.  I mean getting used to American culture.

Nobody here talks about sex and they leave it to their children to figure it out by themselves. Now it would not have been a big problem but for the invention of internet and the easily available information regarding sex it is very easy for people to get misguided.

We have a lot of castes with in Hindus; I mean divisions within a division. I will list some here: Gounder, Brahmins, Naykar, Chettiar, Nadaar and many more.

It is not only a sin to have sex before marriage; it is a great sin to marry people from other caste.

For example: My caste is Gounder and if I marry some one from Brahmin caste, I will lose respect and support from my relatives who all will see me as some one who has just committed a crime.

We are not allowed to choose our life partner until after we complete our studies and go for work… [A]t the age of may be 27 or 28 our parents will take our horoscope and go to our caste office where they will have similar horoscopes of men and women who are ready for marriage within our caste only(strictly). And select a suitable match. This matching is done solely based on the word of an astrologer who will look for matching horoscopes (I don’t know how they match but they look at some old astrology books written by sages) and tell our parents.

If we don’t marry them and try to convince our parents of love marriage (…choosing our own partners), even though some times our parents will accept our decision because of their love for us, our relatives wont respect us and wont want to talk to us.

How could they decide who we should live our life with and what if for a girl the guy who was selected was… [of poor] character?  Why should she put up with such a boy, while she has the option of finding the man of her dreams and living life to the fullest?

If you go in to a Brahmin family and look at their life style and…  look at my family’s life style it would be very different, We eat differently, talk the same language with a different slang, it would feel as though you have left… [the] country and entered another one.

…[I]nter-caste marriage does not have the convenience of mother-in-law [or] father-in-law relationships because, a Brahmin will not like the way we live and we won’t like the way they live. If some one goes against the norm and marries outside of the caste they are by themselves for their entire life. This is changing slowly now and people are now trying to learn different cultures, because they have no choice. At least that is what my mother is doing, because she has no other choice. My sister married a Brahmin boy. But the rate of change is very slow.

Now people in India want their daughters and sons to be settled in USA, but want their cultures to be preserved. I don’t understand how this works. They want their children to live in USA because it is a developed country and it gives them a sense of pride to tell everyone that their son has got married to some one in their culture and it is arranged marriage and they are living in USA which is a dream in it’s self for them. But they did not know that, if and when, their son puts his children in an American school he would only follow that culture and this caste differences would vanish. If they want the luxuries and opportunities and the American life style, they have to leave behind their cultural differences.

So slowly due to globalization and because more and more Indians are settling in US and some are coming back, I see that US culture is spreading rapidly in INDIA.

I can understand when you once told me, it will take some time for Indians to wake up to HBI knowledge. Because every one here wants to experience western way of living, which is what they are told when they are very young, they have to go USA for their studies. No one will think about life and its inner meanings until they experience that way of living (American) and which will in turn break away the cultural differences…