Exposure is everything.
As a parent:
“The nationality and all of that never mattered to me because one of my own uncle’s married a German, and my younger brother’s married to an American. Also because I worked with an international community I had friends from all over the world. And I really cherished them and liked them and valued them as human beings so it was never a thing in me that they must marry Indians. I knew that it just didn’t matter; the colour of the skin or the nationality just did not matter.”
But parents can differ…
“In our own family, my husband is not very agreeable to them marrying anybody other than Indian. Totally not, because his growing up and his family, they never saw anybody marrying out of the community. But because Kartini has an Australian boyfriend, and my husband’s met him a few times and actually has gotten to know him and like him a lot, that barrier that he had put up, that he was just not going to accept anybody other than from my own community, a Jain from India, has gone…he has actually embraced the fact that she’s picked such a nice man.”
As a child:
“If we have exposed them to the international community, then they have a right to marry somebody from the international community. Because they’ve accepted each other totally as each other and are not looking at the skin colour or the passport.”
No marriage has a guarantee.
“In any marriage there is such a huge adjustment, even if it was someone you marry from the same community, same caste, same this, same that…there’s no guarantee of the marriage succeeding. Because two people are entirely two separate human beings and it’s a huge task.
So this is just like one more component added onto it if they marry somebody from a different country. Because there are no guarantees anyways you may as well start with a feeling of love for the other person, and give the blessing, and give the guidance and support that it’ll work, or help them make it work.
They both have to make the effort to get to know each other’s culture, and the family culture mainly. I think the family culture is more important than the country’s culture, because each family has their own lifestyle and values and everything. And that’s much more important than the country’s culture.”
