Arranging a Marriage in India-Nanda

Nanda throughout this article is having a hard time helping her Indian friend's son a wife. At first she thought that arranging marriages for your children was wrong because they wouldn't know their spouse's on a personal level. But once she heard her friends reasons for choosing for her son, she kind of understood and wanted to help. Throughout helping, she found that it was not as easy being matchmaker for someone in India as it was in America. You had many things to look at like class, the familie's background, how well educated, and many more things. Nanda found someone that she thought would be good but the mother of the son said they had way too many siblings and they wouldn't be able to afford a glorious wedding and a big wedding gift. To me this was ridiculous and I thought to myself, using my own opinions and beliefs, that a marriage should not be about a families financial standing or how well the wedding can be put on, it should be about the love between the two people. In India Love is the product of marriage and in America Marriage is the product of love. This quote was said in class today and I totally agreed that this article proves that is the way the Indians think. The children of the family can focus more on their lives and living them than on marriage because they have arranged marriages by their parents. Overall I thought the article was good and I can now see why some cultures have arranged marriages. Ethnocentrism is the perfect word to describe this article because Nanda went into this situation with her own values and opinions and judged their culture based on them. But she soon realized, as did I reading this article, that they do not arrange them just to be mean or cruel, they do it so they can insure their children the best lives with the best spouse and family.