Memoirs of a wimpy kid

Not only has my pre-tween boy read all 12 Wimpy Kid books, watched various movie versions, played the board game, and been through various activity books, he has convinced me to read (by which I mean listen on audibles) a few.  They are fun.  It’s not hard for me to see a bit of my own wonder years in these stories.

Of course, my tweens were in the 1980s Dhaka, not modern American suburbia.  My teen years were in international schools in the tropics, owing to my father’s job.  I was in high school (in the American sense) at the same time as the gang from 90210.  A quarter century before social media, our social lives were shaped by and mirrored what we watched on the tele.  It was appropriate years before Rage Against the Machine penned — Cinema simulated life in trauma / Forthright culture, Americana / Chained to the dream they got you searchin’ for……

Imagine then how old I felt when watching Dylan McKay grounding his teenage son in Riverdale.

Now, here was an idea — take the key characters from a comic book set in the happy days and set them in a town that must be the twin of Twin Peaks, this was stuff of inspired imagination.  I found the first few episodes of Riverdale riveting, but then somehow lost track.  I guess these days, if it is not binge-watched, it’s hard to watch at all.

Well, I wouldn’t at all recommend binge-watching the other Netflix teen drama from 2017.  Then again, I found the show quite padded, and just-not-good-TV, so I wouldn’t really recommend it at all.

But even a bad show, sometime, makes you think.  

Libraries…

… are fun places with lots of books.  I love reading books.  I want to be the class librarian because I want to protect the books and help you read them.

That was the eight year old’s ‘statement’ as he nominated himself for the class librarian on the first day of Grade 3.  He was super excited to tell me about it as we walked home after school.  I shared his excitement as I too had great fun at libraries.

Gone Girl

 

What are you thinking?  How are you feeling?  What have we done to each other?  What will we do?

The primal questions of any marriage — says, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) as David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl begins.  Wrestling with the unravelling of own marriage, the questions came as a jolt as I watched the scene in a lonely hotel room after a long day of work.

A decade of marriage, and you realise you don’t know who your partner is.  Worse.  You don’t know who you are anymore.

What have we done to each other?  Indeed!

The case for arranged marriage

Update: April 11 425pm BDT at the end

Theirs was the stuff of fairy tale romance.  The son of a Supreme Court judge and a charismatic English professor, he was brought up to be a pukka gentleman.  She came from the wrong side of the poorest of backwater towns, first in the family to make it to university, relying on nothing but her grit.  They were white collar professionals, colleagues who fell in love in their late 20s.  I was there—it happened in my living room actually.  They moved in, and then moved overseas together for greater opportunities, for both.  Careers progressed, and love deepened.  About ten years ago, they got married in a picturesque island.  Couple of years later they returned to a large wooden house with a big backyard to raise a little girl, and then a boy.  Financially secure — they benefitted from the asset booms of that decade — it was a time for career change, to follow their hearts.  She joined politics.  He decided to pursue his passion for writing.

Then the fairy tale ended.  While turning 40, she finds that politics is hard work, and merely willing isn’t enough.  He is in deep blue funk, with writing going nowhere.  Kids are alright, I guess.  But the parents most definitely aren’t.

How about a more conventional couple?  Both from straight forward middle class families.  Met in their 20s through friends, and started seeing each other frequently, and then exclusively.  He had an opportunity to move overseas for work.  Marriage was the only way for them to be together, even though this meant an end to her career.  A decade and three daughters later, she is mostly tired and bitter.  Meanwhile, he wonders what might have been had they never met.

These are not isolated incidences.  Whether in Desh or in the west, I see couples of my age and socioeconomic background, regardless of ethnicity or culture, in stale, unexciting marriages where no one is really at fault, where the fire of passion is buried in repressed memories and forced indifference.  And these are the marriages that survive.  Scarily, I joked recently with a friend that I am more likely now to attend a social shindig marking the end of someone’s marriage than a wedding!

What happens?  In short, life.  It’s hard to navigate the demands of modern life — finances needed for the standard of living we aspire to, but also the expectations of personal achievements we set ourselves, and then there is the social rat race that none of us are really immune from.  All that before we throw in the curve ball of raising kids and the emotional and physical tolls that entail.

Economics of marriage payments

I grew up reading about the evils of the dowry system.  And decades of concerted government policies and NGO activism later, dowry still seems to still haunt many a marriage in Bangladesh.  In fact, according to one study, prevalence of dowry has been consistently increading in rural Bangladesh — whereas merely a tenth of families paid a dowry before the 1970s, the proportion rose to three-fifths in the 1990s to over three-quarters in 2003.

Is there an economics literature on dowry, or marriage payments more generally?  Siwan Anderson, a Canadian economist, has done much work on this field.  Drawing heavily on her work, over the fold is my understanding of the literature.