An Absurd Question, A Cop-Out Answer - Review Of Movie "What's Love Got To Do With It?"

[Warning: Spoilers galore!]

I was very intrigued by the billing of this "cross-cultural romantic comedy" that had a number of celebrity names attached to it - Director Shekhar Kapur, screenwriter Jemima Khan and top stars Emma Thompson and Shabana Azmi.

As the film began, I was also happy to see that it starred Shazad Latif, whom I'd seen before as Ash Tyler in Star Trek - Discovery.

The film began promisingly enough, but to cut a long story short, it posed a question that was illogical, and then answered it with a cop-out ending.

I won't bother going through the entire plot with its twists and turns, since you can find those in other reviews. Let me explain why I felt the way I did about this movie.

The movie moved quickly onto its plot premise - the phenomenon of arranged marriages (also called "assisted marriages") prevalent in the Indian subcontinent. A number of pros and cons were aired in early dialogues, so the question set up by the movie was clear:

Are arranged marriages better than "love marriages"? The definition of "better" is of course vague. Is it the durability of the marriage itself, the happiness of the partners, the stability of the family setup for children, the harmony of the larger families involved, etc.?

This question strikes me as absurd because it sounds like "What arrangement of deck chairs would be better at preventing the sinking of the Titanic?"

The necessary conditions for a successful marriage should be no secret:

- Mutual respect and trust

- A willingness on the part of both partners to learn, adapt and change themselves

Additionally, if the partners possess complementary strengths and have the patience to communicate in a way that is aligned to their partner's thinking style, they're set to be a winning team.

Needless to say, the circumstances under which the two partners come together is irrelevant. They could have met on their own and fallen in love, or they could have been introduced by their parents and agreed to marry before they had significant feelings for each other. Heck, they could even have been forced into marriage, for that matter!

So that in a nutshell is why I thought the film went completely off-target. I have seen examples of successful and unsuccessful "love marriages" in real life. I have also seen examples of successful and unsuccessful arranged marriages. It's clear as day to me that this categorisation is completely irrelevant when it comes to predicting the success of a marriage or the happiness of a couple. Without mutual respect and trust, and without a willingness on the part of both partners to learn, to adapt and to change themselves, a marriage cannot "succeed" or be a happy one. It has nothing to do with whether the marriage was "arranged" or took place after the two partners had fallen in love. The film didn't bother to raise this most important aspect of the topic at all (although it made an attempt to address the issue of marital fidelity, which is related to trust).

At the end of the movie, the arranged marriage of the male lead (Qazim Khan) fails, because it turns out that his bride was in love with someone else, and was forced by her parents into marrying him. They divorce and she leaves to rejoin her lover. Predictably, Qazim then pairs up with his childhood neighbour and friend (Zoe), who has been cataloguing the entire process of his arranged marriage.

In the style of "Four Weddings and a Funeral" then, the movie turned out to be "Two Love Marriages and the Failure of an Arranged Marriage".

The reason I call this a "cop-out" ending is because this seems to be the only acceptable answer that filmdom anywhere is allowed to provide: Love-before-marriage good, arranged marriage bad.

Even in India, where over 90% of all marriages are arranged, Bollywood and regional cinema only promote a romantic narrative where people fall in love and often battle parental and societal opposition to get married. The big screen doesn't reflect societal reality at all!

Is it possible at all for a movie to be honest and matter-of-fact about this topic, I wonder? Or will fear of box office failure forever keep storytellers from telling the unglamorous truth about what a happy marriage really needs?

[If you liked this post, check out a related one - "Why Marriage Is Hard Work - Two Psychometric Models Provide An Answer"]

Why Marriage Is Hard Work - Two Psychometric Models Provide An Answer

This insight crept up on me rather gradually. There is a fundamental tension that is inherent in the necessary ingredients of a successful marriage, and it takes conscious effort to overcome this tension.

Two psychometric models explain this tension well, and their creators are Donald O. Clifton and William Edward "Ned" Herrmann. I learnt about both of these models as a result of short courses that I had the privilege to be nominated for during my career. I probably wouldn't have come across them otherwise.

1. "Strengths-Based Psychology" by Donald O. Clifton

The testing tool invented by Donald Clifton has been known by several names - The Gallup Test, StrengthsFinder, Gallup Strengths Assessment and Clifton Strengths Test.

It describes 34 themes that make up a person's personality.

1. Achiever - a constant need for achievement
2. Activator - impatience for action
3. Adaptability- ability to respond to the demands of the moment
4. Analytical - objective and data-driven
5. Arranger - ability to manage all the variables in a complex situation to produce the most productive configuration
6. Belief - possessing enduring core values
7. Command - ability to take charge
8. Communication - ability to make people listen to you
9. Competition - the desire to win
10. Connectedness - awareness of the interconnectedness of all beings, and the resulting sense of responsibility
11. Consistency - preference for balance, fairness, predictability
12. Context - orientedness due to an ability to join the dots
13. Deliberative - risk-aware and careful
14. Developer - ability to see potential in everyone
15. Discipline - dealing with an unpredictable world through structure that you impose
16. Empathy - seeing the world through the eyes of others
17. Focus - having a clear destination
18. Futuristic - inspiration from what can be
19. Harmony - ability to find common ground and reduce conflict
20. Ideation - the ability to find new perspectives to explain phenomena and address challenges
21. Includer - accepting of all, non-judgemental
22. Individualisation - ability to draw out the best in each person
23. Input - tendency to collect facts and objects in the hope that they will one day prove useful
24. Intellection - introspective, fond of thinking
25. Learner - excited by new knowledge
26. Maximiser - in constant quest of excellence
27. Positivity - contagious enthusiasm
28. Relator - trusting, sharing, risk-taking in vulnerability
29. Responsibility - taking ownership of tasks
30. Restorative - energized by challenge, finds solutions to seemingly unsolvable problems
31. Self-Assurance - confidence not only in one's abilities but also in one's judgement, natural acceptance of accountability
32. Significance - need to stand out, to be recognised, a striving to be exceptional
33. Strategic - ability to see patterns where others see complexity, to see around the next corner, to make selections that work
34. WOO - Winning Others Over, can break the ice, strike up conversations with strangers and making connections

The 34 strengths organised by category

I learnt about the Strengths-based model in the context of organisational team-building. I learnt to accept that people weren't all the same, that they had different strengths, and that rather than try to fix weaknesses in their people, the aim of a manager should be to put together teams of people with complementary strengths, so that the team as a whole could deliver effectively on all its tasks.

This was a rather refreshing approach to management. I had heard of the approach of "playing to one's strengths" in the context of individual self-development, but I was hearing it for the first time in the context of team-building. Organisations need not worry too much about deficiencies in their people. They just have to make sure that their teams as a whole are able to make up for the deficiencies of the individuals they're comprised of.

For example, I worked in the IT Architecture division of several companies, and our job was to "guide investment and design decisions around technology". Not everyone in our team had identical strengths. For example, some were deep thinkers who could come up with innovative models, but who lacked the ability to communicate these ideas effectively and convince other people. There were other people in the team, though, who may not have had the same ability to create models, but who could create effective visualisations of these models such that they were instantly understandable to decision-makers. Together, these two groups of very different people were effective in creating and communicating innovative solutions to the rest of the organisation. That was a practical example to me of complementary skills being effective in an organisational context.

2. The "Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument" by William Herrmann

To my mind, the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is a far more insightful and useful model than the two other models commonly used by organisations - Myers-Briggs Personality Types and the DISC Profile. Unfortunately, this excellent test is not available free of charge, and it is usually only administered through organisational sponsorship.

HBDI identifies four unique thinking styles that people tend to use in various combinations. Some people have a single, dominant thinking style. Others have a combination of two, three or all four, with each style having a certain "weight" relative to the other three.

Each thinking style is given a colour code.

• Blue - Logical, Analytical, Fact-based, Quantitative
• Yellow - Holistic, Intuitive, Integrating, Synthesising
• Red - Interpersonal, Feeling-based, Kinesthetic, Emotional
• Green - Organised, Sequential, Detailed, Risk-aware

These thinking styles are then mapped to the four quadrants of a circle, with blue on the top left, yellow on the top right, red on the bottom right, and green on the bottom left.

Thus, blue and red are in opposing quadrants, just as yellow and green are in opposing quadrants. These pairs of thinking styles are completely "opposite" to one another.

More interesting are the adjacent thinking styles. They have certain common traits. The reason is that the four directions of the circle represent certain modes of thinking.

• Left - The "left brain", realistic and commonsensical
• Right - The "right brain", idealistic and intuitive
• Top - the "cerebral" brain, cognitive and pragmatic
• Bottom - the "limbic" brain, visceral and instinctual

The four thinking styles, and the "modes" of the brain that they relate to

Adjacent colours therefore have a certain affinity.

• Blue and Yellow are both cerebral rather than limbic. They think cognitively about things rather than react viscerally.
• Yellow and Red are both right-brained. They rely on feeling and intuition rather than pure logic.
• Red and Green are both limbic rather than cerebral. They have instinctive reactions to situations.
• Green and Blue are both left-brained. They are grounded and realistic.

One of the core themes in a course on HBDI (after all participants have been tested and assessed as to which quadrant(s) they belong to) is the challenge of communication. In an organisation, people need to communicate with others, explain their perspectives on situations, negotiate for resources, convince decision-makers in favour of one or another option, etc. When people have very different thinking styles, they can often talk past one another instead of connecting. This is because people are used to expressing ideas from their own perspective, and this perspective may make little sense to a person with a very different thinking style, who is used to seeing things in a very different way.

Effective communication requires a knowledge of the other person's thinking style, and a formulation of one's argument in terms the other person can naturally understand.

Communication between people with thinking styles in adjacent quadrants is relatively easier than communication between people in opposite quadrants. They can rely on certain common thinking modes to find common ground. It is a far more difficult task for people in opposite quadrants to be able to communicate meaningfully.

It is common for people in the Blue quadrant to believe that they are "superior" thinkers, but the HBDI consultants take great pains to emphasise that this is not so. None of these four thinking styles is "superior" to any other. Each has its own strengths. It is necessary for people to treat their colleagues with respect, regardless of what their predominant thinking style is, and to make honest efforts to communicate with them in a way the other person can understand.

Marriage and the Confluence of the two Models

It struck me somewhere along the journey of my own marriage that the notions of complementary strengths and thinking styles were both hugely relevant to the way my wife and I interpreted life events and responded to them. We have had arguments and conflicts, and we have also had successes and triumphs. This is the distillation of my thoughts.

Marriage is fundamentally teamwork. Two individuals embark on a lifelong project together, and they deal with a multitude of challenges as they go along, with specific tasks and deliverables expected at various life stages. Building meaningful careers, balancing life and work, raising children, buying a home, investing for retirement, dealing with the pressures of extended family, dealing with unexpected events like illnesses, job stress, financial hardship, etc., are part of the never-ending sequence of life events that a couple must confront and overcome together.

It is unrealistic to expect that each of the individuals in a marriage is a perfectly balanced individual with all the strengths required to deal with life's vicissitudes. The most pragmatic solution is therefore for the couple to have complementary strengths, so that between the two of them, they have the ability to deal with a greater proportion of challenges than either of them could alone.

However, complementary strengths come with their own inherent problem, and this is the tension I referred to earlier. Strengths are related to thinking styles, and complementary strengths are likely to be related to thinking styles in opposite quadrants. As we know, communication is difficult between people with different thinking styles, because they see situations very differently, and find it hard to understand or convince the other of their respective points of view.

It may seem ideal for a couple to have identical thinking styles. They can then understand each other most naturally, and the possibility of conflict between them may seem low. But two people who think alike are likely to share the same blind spots. Over the long haul, as they face a multitude of different life challenges, it is possible that they may make some costly mistakes because in their case, two heads are no better than one. Mistakes and failures can then introduce a different set of stresses into the marriage.

It may seem depressing to conclude that there is no ideal marriage, after all. A couple needs to have complementary strengths to be able to negotiate the gamut of life's challenges successfully over the long haul, yet complementary strengths imply different thinking styles, which make communication a challenge.

It needn't be depressing at all, though! The flip side of the coin is that a couple with mutual respect and trust, who put in the effort to understand each other's thinking styles, and who consciously learn to communicate in a way that the other can understand, can get the best of both worlds. They can function effectively as a team, and kick goal after goal.

[If you liked this post, check out a related one - "An Absurd Question, A Cop-Out Answer - Review Of Movie "What's Love Got To Do With It?""

The Weight of Tradition

One of my friends posted on Facebook about a Japanese custom where the host comes out and stands in the cold when taking leave of a departing guest, waves goodbye to them and only goes back into the house when the guest's car is out of sight. We had an interesting discussion about how spontaneous gestures are touching but when these are cast into concrete and become part of a culture or tradition, they could become onerous. In my response, I said the Japanese in particular have a culture of forced politeness that makes them think they're being rude even if they do perfectly reasonable things, like avoid the chillies in a dish that they find too spicy. I said they needed to be kinder to themselves and not let tradition oppress them so much, and this then set off the cultural antibodies that perpetually lurk in my bloodstream. Hence this blog post.

I've been a bit of an iconoclast all my life, much to the exasperation of my extended family. (My immediate family has been much more supportive, possibly because my parents were themselves no admirers of traditional customs.)

Two examples come to mind.

1. One of the cultural differences between North Indians and South Indians is the practice of touching the feet of elders. South Indians have a practice of not just bending to touch the feet but of prostrating full-length before elders to receive their blessings. However, this is typically done on special occasions only, such as when taking leave of one's grandparents after a month-long stay, or at weddings when the bride and groom seek the blessings of the elders present.

With North Indians, this is more of a "quickie", and is accomplished by just bending down from the waist instead of prostrating themselves on the floor. Since this is a much more "lightweight" action, they can afford to do it more often and they do. One could say they do it at the drop of a hat (almost as if they were bending to pick up said hat ;-). See someone with grey hair, dip and touch! To South Indians, this is amusing to watch. Also very emotionally touching if you're not used to it. I know of a Telugu girl whose family's objections to her marrying a Rajasthani dissolved when he visited their home and executed a machine-gun touching of everyone's feet as soon as he entered. After that, all the elderly ladies would vie with each other to cook dishes for him and wouldn't hear a negative word about him. It helped that he was also a nice guy, but that's the secret weapon North Indians can use to disarm their Southern neighbours.

The dark side of this tradition is of course when it's forced. I know of girls from liberal and westernised families marrying into more conservative ones, who are expected to touch their parents-in-laws' feet every morning when they first see them. Quite a few of them chafe at this because they consider it demeaning.

On a lighter note, the daughter of my cousin (who married a North Indian) refused to touch the feet of her paternal grandmother, saying, "We South Indians don't do this." And this from a girl who spoke no Tamil at all! Identity can be donned and shed as convenient, it would seem.

2. One of the arguments of the neo-conservative Hindu is that if one only takes the trouble to understand "our great rituals", one will understand the wisdom of our forefathers. I call this bullshit, akin to treating scriptures as sacred just because they're in Sanskrit. After all, one can find some pretty bawdy stuff masquerading as ancient Sanskrit literature.

Marriage rituals are believed to belong to this set of misunderstood cultural treasures. I was surprised to learn that the term "decent marriage" as a requirement in Indian matrimonial ads was a code-word for elaborate rituals. Perhaps simple weddings seem indecent to some people. I recognise that every such ritual had an original purpose and meaning, but since Indian society has been traditionally agrarian, these rituals have a lot to do with land, harvests and fertility (fertility both of humans and the soil). Many of these practices are therefore outdated in a modern, urban context. Many practices also have a feudal basis, and I would reject them out of hand. Hindu rituals are riven with casteism and sexism, and the baggage needs to be discarded and the entire culture given a complete and thorough overhaul.

My mother pointed out one such example at a cousin's wedding. There was a ceremony where the bride was seated on the ground and the yoke of a bullock-cart was placed (lightly) on her head. This would of course be trumpeted by the neo-conservatives as rich in meaning, because it is meant to symbolise the responsibility of a wife. I guess my mother's feminist sensibilities were offended at this, because she wondered aloud to me why they didn't seat the bride and groom side by side and place the yoke over both their shoulders. It would have symbolised the fact that they would now have to bear the responsibilities of a household together and share the burden equally.

In short, I am a student of culture but not a blind fan. I hate it when cultural traditions oppress the individual.

And now I've got that off my chest :-).