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Indian Matchmaking Only Scratches the Surface of a Big Problem - A Critique

Sonia Saraiya in Vanity Fair

Every reality show has at least one villain. In Indian Matchmaking, that villain is 34-year-old Aparna Shewakramani, a prospective bride who’s critical of every man she meets and vocal about disliking things like the beach, relaxing, and podcasts. Early on, she tells the camera she hasn’t regretted a decision she’s made since the age of three. In her finest moment, presented with a suitor with a sense of humor, she sighs: “You know how I hate comedy.”

In reality, Aparna’s probably not as insufferable as she seems. But her apparent unsuitability for the dating world makes her a perfect subject for Indian Matchmaking, which follows Mumbai–based matchmaker Sima Taparia as she tries to get every single and reasonably well-to-do Indian in her path married to a heterosexual partner of her, and their parents’, choosing.

Okay, I’m being a little flippant. As Sima and the show itself frequently remind us, arranged marriage is not quite the form of social control it used to be; everyone here emphasizes that they have the right to choose or refuse the matches presented to them. But as becomes especially clear when Sima works in India, that choice is frequently and rather roughly pressured by an anvil of social expectations and family duty.

In the most extreme case, a 25-year-old prospective groom named Akshay Jakhete is practically bullied by his mother, Preeti, into choosing a bride. Somehow, she claims, Akshay’s failure to choose a bride by the ripe old age of 25 is a disappointment to his parents, an obstacle to the conception of his older brother’s as yet nonexistent firstborn baby, even a drag on Preeti’s own physical health. She breaks out her home blood pressure monitor, telling him that her high numbers are a direct result of the stress he’s causing her. I’ve always thought of my mom as a champion of desi guilt, but Preeti really puts her to shame. (It should be said that despite all of this, Akshay says on the show that his ideal bride is “someone just like my mother.”)

Indian Matchmaking smartly reclaims and updates the arranged marriage myth for the 21st century, demystifying the process and revealing how much romance and heartache is baked into the process even when older adults are meddling every step of the way. But for me, at least, the show’s value is as a vibrant validation of how brutal the gauntlet of Indian matchmaking can be—a practice that begins with your parents’ friends and relatives gossiping about you as a teenager and only intensifies as you get older. Though these families use a matchmaker, the matching process is one the entire community and culture is invested in. In this context, romance is not a private matter; your love life is everyone’s business.

Let’s start by clearing up some terminology. Netflix’s unscripted show is called Indian Matchmaking, but it takes place both in India and America, with matchmaker Sima, based in Mumbai, flying back and forth as well as handling clients via FaceTime. The Indians and immigrants represented aren’t really a cross section of the country’s vast diversity: The show focuses almost entirely on upper-caste, well-to-do, North Indian Hindu families. (That’s also my background, so Indian Matchmaking is playing tennis in my backyard.) A few families show off a level of wealth that borders on obscene: At one point, Preeti pulls out a king’s ransom of precious jewelry, emeralds and diamonds and gold, and proudly brags that the display is just “20%” of what her future daughter-in-law will inherit on her wedding day.   

Altogether, it’s a little alarming that Indian Matchmaking features not a single Muslim match, just one or two individuals with heritage from South India, and only one whom we could call low-caste, though the show takes pains to not present it so bluntly.

Director Smriti Mundhra told Jezebel that she pitched the show around Sima, who works with an exclusive set of clients. Perhaps that narrow focus expresses more about the stratification of Indian culture than it does about the producers’ biases—but Indian Matchmaking touches lightly on the culture that creates these biases. The most explicit it gets is with the story of event planner Nadia Jagessar, who tells the camera she’s struggled to find a match in the past because she’s Guyanese Indian. This is code for a number of conditions: Nadia’s family, originally Indian, immigrated to Guyana in the 1800s, along with a vast influx of indentured Indian labor shipped around the world after the British outlawed slavery. Many consider them low-caste, or not “really” Indian; there is a suspicion of their heritage being mixed, carrying with it the stigma of being tainted. Yet the show merely explains that for many Indian men, bright, bubbly, beautiful Nadia is not a suitable match.

The parents task Sima with following multiple stringent expectations. Some are understandably cultural, perhaps: A preference for a certain language or religion, or for astrological compatibility, which remains significant for many Hindus. Other preferences, though, are little more than discrimination. They demand that prospective brides be “slim,” “fair,” and “tall,” a ruthless standard for female beauty that’s also racialized—and while the demands are most exacting in India, they are not exclusive to the subcontinent. Houston–based Aparna, for example, euphemistically states her preference for a “North Indian”—which might sound innocent enough to the average listener, but to me sounded like just another way of saying light-skinned. In the final episode, a new participant, Richa, makes it explicit: “not too dark, you know, like fair-skinned.” As Mallika Rao writes at Vulture, it’s not exactly surprising, but whew.

Divorced clients are also subjected to particularly harsh judgment. Sima bluntly tells one fetching single mom, Rupam, that she would typically never take on a client like her. The options she finds for Rupam are pointedly, pathetically slim pickings; Rupam ends up leaving the matchmaking process after meeting a prospective match on Bumble instead.

In Delhi, Ankita Bansal’s story takes on multiple dimensions of exclusion and judgment. She’s both a career woman and one who doesn’t adhere to the Indian beauty standard; previous efforts to find a match have returned the feedback that she’s too independent or not attractive enough. Which is mind-boggling, because Ankita is gorgeous. But she’s also darker, curvier, and shorter than is ideal, and the fact that she started and runs her own company is a threat to men who are looking for a wife to run their household.

To Ankita’s credit, she rejects suggestions that she needs to change herself; she’s become a sort of heroine for Indian Matchmaking viewers, who cheer her for speaking out against this process’s constrictive standards while trying to find love. During her first date on the show, though, Ankita hits it off with a suitor only to have a meltdown, a few scenes later, upon learning that he’s divorced. Granted, some of the anxiety seems to stem from the matchmakers not informing her before their date that he had previously been married. But the failure of what was otherwise a charming first date goes toward illustrating how harsh the stigma can be in Indian matchmaking—and how discrimination cuts both ways. 

What I want from Indian Matchmaking is probably impossible: Not just an exploration of arranged marriage, but a true reckoning with its limitations. Mundhra, the director, addressed some of these limitations in her 2017 documentary A Suitable Girl. But Indian Matchmaking turns the tradition’s hypocrisies and frailties into a carnivalesque background for individual stories to take place in front of. To a degree, that’s how it works for those of us who are in the culture; whether or not you participate, the expectations and biases of arranged marriage are always just an arm’s length away. But it’s charitable—outright propaganda, arguably—to frame it merely as a fun, silly circus of chattering parents and matchmakers with spreadsheets.

The proponents of arranged marriage are quick to point to India’s low divorce rate and various success stories—and undoubtedly, in the past and today, there are countless happy couples who were set up through some version of traditional matchmaking. But that doesn’t change the fact that arranged marriage is a family-sanctioned form of social control—a way for a community’s elders to enforce certain norms onto their children. Quite literally, it regulates reproduction by determining the bounds of their descendants’ gene pool. It diminishes the individual’s personal choice in favor of the collective’s stability.

To many young men and women looking to get married, that’s precisely the appeal: They love their families, and want to match with someone who will mesh with the religion, traditions, and values that they practice. As Sima says frequently in Indian Matchmaking, a wedding unites two families, so it’s only natural that the two families would have a say in what happens to their child. Yet this sunny view of arranged marriage glosses over a lot of potential complications, ranging from individual heartache and loss to the wholesale porting of familial dysfunction and despair from one generation to the next. The stigma around divorce is so high—the show does not dance around that, at least—that the choice of partner is typically permanent, regardless of how unsuitable a pair might be for each other. The combination of tradition and unhappiness can be extremely dangerous: In 2005, India’s large-scale National Family Health Survey found that over 37% of women in India had experienced some kind of physical or sexual spousal abuse. Beyond violence, women in India are often cut off from access to household funds, and are not permitted to make decisions up to and including family planning.

It is the great irony of a country that churns out love songs in its melodramatic Bollywood musicals, that turns weddings into three-, five-, or seven-day affairs: Indian marriage is frequently unhappy and unequal—less romantic, more another building block in a patriarchal society. Yet the passion for traditional arranged marriage is so intense that when couples marry outside the strictures of their familial norms, they may be disowned or ostracized. And as the show never even acknowledges, there is no place in arranged marriages—or much of traditional Indian society—for any sort of queer partnership.

This last detail might be why Pradhyuman Maloo, a self-described “rich pretty boy,” is both one of the show’s more loathsome characters and possibly one of its heroes. His well-connected family is eager for him to get married; a bevy of dark-skinned service staff hover out of frame in every scene. He’s a professional jewelry designer and enthusiastic amateur chef, with impeccable hair in every scene. Pradhyuman has reportedly been offered more than 150 proposals from eligible girls, and has turned every single one down. On one hand, he seems like a self-centered asshole—at one point, he tells his sister he feels deep love only for himself. On the other hand, you wish someone on the show would simply ask him if he’s even interested in women.

Irony isn’t dead: None of the participants in Indian Matchmaking found a spouse on the show. The eight-episode first season doesn’t end so much as run out of time—but there’s plenty of room for a season two, if Netflix wants one.

In the meantime, I’m left with my own thoughts. My parents had an arranged marriage, and it has been an unhappy one. I decided at a young age I wouldn’t go through the same process, with all the confidence and American privilege only a five year old can have. Neither my refusal nor their own unhappiness stopped my parents from trying to set me up—more and more feverishly as I passed 30 and still hadn’t “settled down,” as they put it.

It wasn’t just them—it was everyone. I wore high heels and a sari to a pre-event for a cousin’s wedding in India and got a marriage proposal by the end of the day, from another guest who had a relative in America. My cousin told me I should have expected it because I wore clothes that looked so adult. I was barely 22. An American college student has no context for marriage proposals from complete strangers; I didn’t even know how to talk about this phenomenon with friends. I just did my best to ignore it.

At a low point for all of us, my mom made a profile for me on shaadi.com, a popular matchmaking site for Indians abroad. I was a little astounded to find not only was she messaging potential suitors—“everyone does it for their kids,” she informed me—but that she’d also radically altered my physical type for the website; I had grown a couple of inches taller and lost 30 pounds. Weight came up again and again in this world. I grudgingly went on a date organized by my mom’s cousin, only to discover after we decidedly had no sparks that the guy I met had to be talked into meeting someone who weighed more than 125 pounds.

I did get married; my matchmaker was Tinder, and to my delight, my husband satisfies none of the search criteria my mother put into the shaadi.com search engine. I’m lucky that my parents came around to having a white son-in-law, and I know that if he were Black, Muslim, or low-caste, it would have been a much harder path to acceptance. He and I watched Indian Matchmaking together, and though the show has its limitations, I am grateful that it offered him a window into the pressures I grew up with. (He says while he would like to end up with me in “all possible timelines,” he would also pay good money to see me on the show.)

My parents have split up now, which is still incredibly uncommon, even in the Indian diaspora. But it interested me that in Indian Matchmaking, two different participants have parents who divorced: Aparna’s one, and a charming, nerdy guy named Vyasar Ganesan is the other. Even where the arranged marriage model hasn’t worked, the appetite for it is outsized.

Indian culture makes marriage so central to society—and so vital to an individual’s path—that it tends to ignore the potential downsides. The people who don’t fit into tradition’s methodology get sifted out, left not just without a picture-perfect marriage but without the acceptance and cultural identity that accompany it. I know that by opting out of the arranged marriage pathway, I have made it much harder for my future child to speak the language or practice the religious traditions of my ancestors; he’ll have to navigate the annoying cultural straddling of being from many places at once. It was the right choice for me, but it’s a hard thing to live with. The price of belonging to an Indian culture is to leave some of your individuality behind—and for me, at least, it was a price I was not willing to pay.

By the end, Aparna became a tragic figure for me. When we see her at home—dressed in outfits that seem identical to her mother’s, pushing her two tiny dogs in a stroller—she looks like an oversize little girl. There’s something so sad about her narrow ideas of what her future partner should be like; it reflects how little latitude she allows herself in her own life. Her mother, Jotika, is another meme-able figure: The production cuts together a proclamation that all she wants for her daughter is happiness and a serious monologue, directed at the camera, about how “all” she asked of her daughters is to never make her look bad and to get not just one or two degrees, but “nothing less than three.” A few episodes later, Aparna tells a suitor that she hates being a lawyer, and has been trying to do something else for years.

The tradition in India and the Indian diaspora seems to be less about marriage and more about this intense, all-consuming pressure to mold your children. Nothing seems to fuel the marriage complex more than the fear of social stigma, of being somehow outside, somehow othered. In this context, it’s no wonder that matchmaking brings out the worst colorism, casteism, and classism that Indians have to offer. I wish Indian Matchmaking said anything about that. But at least it gives the world a view into the false promise of arranged marriage, even if, by the end, the series is still starry-eyed, committed to a fantasy. Aparna, my parents, all of the frantic parents who catch Sima’s wrist at a party and whisper biodata into her ear; they just want what was promised. They just want to belong.

Nepotistic privilege should be a matter of social shame

Woke young millennials should start looking down upon friends who take the easy route of following up on their parents’ careers writes SHIVAM VIJ in The Print 

We don’t know for sure the reason why Bollywood actor Sushant Singh Rajput took his own life, but the resulting debate on nepotism is a turning point in Indian society. Rajput was not only an outsider to the joint family called Bollywood, but an outsider from Patna. As a result, nepotism has now become a Hindi word found in Hindi papers.

Before Rajput’s suicide, it was Kangana Ranaut who took up the matter. Outside of Bollywood, India’s public discourse often discusses ‘dynasty’ and ‘dynastic privilege’ in Indian politics.

This is an opportunity for Indian society to broaden the discussion. Given a chance, we are all nepotistic. There is nobody who won’t promote their children’s careers in the same field as theirs. This is part of our tradition of caste and kinship. To bring down the edifice of nepotism in Bollywood and politics, we have to question nepotism in society at large.

A drain on the GDP

This is a serious issue with implications not only for equality of opportunity but also for India’s economic progress. Nepotism promotes mediocrity, and thus low productivity.

The Congress party insists on being led by Indira Gandhi’s grandchildren, regardless of whether they are the best people suited for the role. The result is for all to see: a most ineffective opposition. Similarly, the Bollywood marketing machine will force you to watch an Arjun Kapoor movie, even if he has the same face and same expression throughout the movie. He can’t act, but the movie will still make a profit thanks to the marketing machine. And even if it flops, he will still get another role. The result is that India has a lot of terrible cinema.

India’s legal profession is said to be controlled by some 500 families. If you are a young lawyer, you have to struggle for years at a pittance of a salary with senior lawyers before the profession will let you stand on your feet. Meanwhile, the fraternity is full of third-rate lawyers who keep getting cases and corporate retainerships only because their fathers or mothers are famous advocates. 

When an internship is a phone call away

In much the same way, nepotistic privilege affects the overall quality of many parts of the Indian economy. Our newsrooms are full of children of journalists and even politicians. A well-known journalist’s son or daughter gets an internship with a phone call whereas those without such access keep emailing their CVs with no one bothering to even open their emails.

The unfairness does not stop there. The other day, I saw a prominent academic promote a senior journalist’s daughter on Twitter, praising her with superlatives for an ordinary cub reporter’s work. Nepotistic privilege is thus a life-long privilege. You get a free pass because you are the son or daughter or relative of XYZ. It’s bad enough that she has the advantage of getting story ideas, leads and contacts at home while an ‘outsider’ in the same newsroom will have to struggle much harder to be at the same level. But for your father’s powerful friends to be promoting you on Twitter blindly is absolutely distasteful.

We are all complicit

It is time for all of us to look within. Do we take someone more seriously because their father or mother is successful in the same field? We do, we often do. This is part of our ethos as a caste society. There is, for example, a huge amount of curiosity among the public about star kids. We reward nepotism. Someone with nepotistic privilege may be competent, but you haven’t even tried an ‘outsider’.

We need to flip this formula, not just to provide equality of opportunity but also because every job should have the most competent person doing it. That is why nepotism is an economic issue.

Copy-paste woke culture

To flip it, we need to start seeing nepotistic privilege as a matter of shame. India’s woke millennials, Gen Z and Gen Alpha tend to learn political correctness from American shores. But nepotism is not such a big social issue in the US. We need some originality in our woke politics to start shaming nepotistic privilege. When woke millennials say ‘check your privilege’, they don’t include nepotism because American news sites haven’t yet written about it yet.

In the way that woke people go around ‘cancelling’ those who are misogynistic or homophobic or fatphobic or those who think skin colour defines beauty… yeah, riding pillion on your dad’s career should be seen like that.

If you are a young adult planning your career, and you are planning to take up the same career as your parents, you should feel some shame about it. And your friends should judge you for it.

And you should definitely stop your mom and dad from making the phone call that gets you the free pass. Name dropping shouldn’t get you a job — your CV and work should.

Of all the professions in the world, your inner calling turns out to be the same as your parent’s? Where’s the originality, the rebellion, where’s your individualism?

Similarly, parents successful in a profession should encourage their children to find a different profession. In a country where the caste system is literally about profession, this is key to social democratisation.

It will be your turn next

Maybe you really, really want to follow the same profession as your parent. Here’s the challenge. Can you do it on a different turf? If you are a Bollywood star kid, can you ‘launch’ your career in a country other than India or with a less-known, less-glitzy banner? If your father is prominent in national politics but inactive in state politics, can you build your own mass popularity in state politics? If your mother is a criminal lawyer, can you at least go work in a corporate law firm?

If you are literally doing what your dad does, just taking on his clients, just running his business, you should, yes, be a little ashamed of yourself. You are occupying a seat that could be occupied by someone more competent than you, no matter how good you think you are at your work.

You should know that the world judges you for it but doesn’t say it yet. Just like the silence about nepotistic privilege has been broken in politics and Bollywood, one day it will be broken in your profession too.

60 is the new 80 thanks to Corona

 Patti Waldmeir in The FT

“Better be safe than sorry.” I have never believed that. 

I have lived my first 65 years often turning a blind eye to risk. I lived in China for eight years, enduring some of the worst industrial pollution on earth, despite having asthma. I risked damaging the lungs of my then small children by raising them in a place where their school often locked them in air-purified classrooms to protect them from the smog. 

Before that, I lived for 20 years in Africa, refusing to boil water in areas where it needed boiling, eating bushmeat at roadside stalls — not to mention the escapades that I got up to as a young woman in the pre-Aids era. 

But now, as I peer over the precipice into life as a senior citizen, coronavirus has finally introduced me to the concept of risk. Part of it is the whole “60 is the new 80” paradigm that the pandemic has forced on us — but most of it is that, whether I like it or not, I fit squarely in the category of “at risk” for severe illness or death if I catch Covid-19. 

I have diabetes, asthma and am finishing my 65th year. I don’t live in a nursing home, a jail, a monastery or a convent (as does one close friend with Covid-19), but according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), I still qualify as high risk because of my underlying conditions and age. 

So what do I — and people like me, I am far from alone — do now that the world is reopening without us? I’ve got some big decisions to make in the next few days. My youngest child is moving back to our flat outside Chicago after a month living elsewhere: does one of us need to be locked in the bedroom? Do I have to eat on the balcony for two weeks? 

There is no shortage of people, not least President Donald Trump, telling me that all this is simple: vulnerable people should just stay home. But what if they live with other people? What if those people have jobs? And what about our dogs? Our two old mutts are overdue for a rabies shot because the vet was only seeing emergencies. Is it safe for me to take them in now? Can my kids go to the dentist, and then come home to live at close quarters with me? 

I asked several medical experts these questions, and they all offered versions of “we haven’t got a clue”. Robert Gabbay, incoming chief scientific and medical officer of the American Diabetes Association, was the most helpful: “Individuals with diabetes are all in the higher-risk category but even within that category, those who are older and with co-morbidities are at more risk — and control of blood glucose seems to matter. 

“You are probably somewhere in the middle” of the high-risk category, he decided. My diabetes is well controlled and I don’t have many other illnesses. “But your age is a factor,” he added. Up to now, I’ve thought I was in the “60 is the new 40 crowd”: now I know there is no such crowd. 

The head of the Illinois Department of Public Health underlined this at the weekend when she gave her personal list of Covid dos and don’ts, including don’t visit a parent who is over 65 with pre-existing conditions for at least a year, or until there is a cure. Dr Ngozi Ezike also said she would not attend a wedding or a dinner party for a year and would avoid indoor restaurants for three months to a year — despite the fact that Chicago’s indoor restaurants reopen on Friday. 

I turned to the CDC, which initially said it would issue new guidance for “at risk” people last week, but didn’t. This would be the same CDC that I trusted when it said not to wear a mask — though 1.3 billion people in China were masking up. Today China, which is 100 times larger by population than my home state of Illinois, has less than three-quarters as many total pandemic deaths. (Yes, I know China has been accused of undercounting cases, but so has the US.) Masks aren’t the only reason; but they are enough of a reason to erode my trust in what the CDC thinks I should do now. 

It doesn’t help that the CDC website lists “moderate to severe asthma” as one of the primary risk factors for poor coronavirus outcomes — while the American Academy of Allergy Asthma and Immunology says “there are no published data to support this determination”, adding that there is “no evidence” that those with asthma are more at risk. Who’s right? 

I need to know: this weekend is the one-year anniversary of the death of my eldest sibling. I’ve chosen not to make the trip to visit his grave in Michigan. Next month, I turn 65, and I want to spend that day with my 89-year-old father: should we rent a camper van, so we don’t infect his household? I thought about a porta potty for the journey, since public toilets are apparently a coronavirus hotspot. When I started searching for “female urination devices” online, I knew it was time to ditch this new “better safe than sorry” persona I’ve assumed under lockdown. 

Maybe it’s time to remind myself of a fact that I once knew: that life is a risky business, and there is only so much I can do about that. I’ll die when it’s my time — probably not a day before or after, coronavirus or no coronavirus.

Court orders Taiwan dentist to pay his own mother for raising him

The Guardian





Taiwan’s top court has ordered a dentist to pay his mother around £554,000 as reimbursement for the money she spent raising and educating him.

The supreme court upheld a previous ruling that the 41-year-old, identified by his family name, Chu, should honour a contract he signed with his mother 20 years ago promising to repay her.

The plaintiff, surnamed Lo, divorced her husband in 1990 and raised their two sons on her own.

Worried that nobody would look after her when she got old, Lo signed the contracts with her sons after they both turned 20, stipulating that they must pay her 60% of the net profit from their incomes.

The supreme court said the contract was valid as Chu was an adult when he signed it, and that as a dentist he was capable of repaying his mother. It ordered him to pay Tw$22.33m ($744,000).

Lo accused her sons of ignoring her after they both started relationships, saying their girlfriends even sent her letters through their lawyers demanding her not to “bother” her sons, according to local reports.

She filed the lawsuit eight years ago when they refused to honour the contracts. The older son eventually paid her Tw$5m to settle the case.

Her younger son claimed that the contract violated “good customs” as raising a child should not be measured in financial terms, and went to court against his mother.

Lo appealed all the way to the supreme court after lower courts ruled in favour of her son.

Cases of abuse and abandonment of senior citizens have been on the rise in Taiwan in recent years, prompting calls for a law to jail adults who fail to look after their elderly parents although it is yet to pass.

Agence France-Presse in Taipei

The Hadiya case: Is it Human Rights v Conservative Hindu Parents?

By Girish Menon

The Hadiya case, currently pending in the Indian Supreme Court, has attracted a lot of debate between the conflicting ideas of an adult’s right to choose and the unreasonable expectations of conservative Hindu parents.

I have gathered from various media reports that Hadiya previously known as Akhila converted to Islam and then sought a husband via a matrimonial advertisement. Through this medium she met and subsequently married Shafin. Hadiya continues to love Shafin and wishes to live with him but is currently not permitted to do so by an interim Supreme Court order arising out of a campaign by her parents.

The Context

India has been an area of frenetic conversion activity by Islamist and Christian denominations.

The Islamists aided and funded by Saudi and Pakistani resources have been active in India subterraneously and have indulged in proselytisation as illustrated by this latest India Today video. India to them is a ‘dar-ul –harb’ (territory of war) and Ghazwa-e-Hind (conquest of India) is their religious duty.

Various Christian churches have also been actively saving heathen souls. Funded by American and European resources a state like Nagaland has become 100 % Christian post 1947.

The Hindus have responded, rather feebly, with their own organisations and programmes like ‘ghar wapasi’ (return home to your roots). Since 2014, under the current supportive government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi they have tried to check the growth and power of the Islamic and Christian organisations.

 Hadiya's embrace of Islam will not be complete without considering this bigger picture issue.

Don’t parents have any say after their child becomes an 18 year old adult?

In the absence of any welfare state provisions in India it is the bank of mum and dad that funds an adult till such time s/he is able to become independent.

In some cases when the 18 year old adult makes wrong decisions it is again the same parents who come to the rescue of such individuals.

Under these circumstances, don’t Hadiya's parents have any say in her life especially in her decision to convert to Islam and to marry a person of her choice?

In my view there is a deliberate attempt to convert the highly complex Hadiya case into a false dichotomy of an individual’s human rights versus her conservative Hindu parents. The case should also consider the data on proselytisation by various groups, how did Hadiya decide to convert to Islam and who will pick up the pieces for Hadiya if she ends up with the Islamic state?

(Inputs received from Gopa Joseph, Suhail Rizwy and Deniz Cris)

The con behind every wedding

Anon in The Guardian

A lavish wedding, a couple in love; romance was in the air, as it should be when two people are getting married. But on the top table, the mothers of the happy pair were bonding over their imminent plans for … divorce.

That story was told to me by the mother of the bride. The wedding in question was two summers ago: she is now divorced, and the bridegroom’s parents are separated. “We couldn’t but be aware of the crushing irony of the situation,” said my friend. “There we were, celebrating our children’s marriage, while plotting our own escapes from relationships that had long ago gone sour, and had probably been held together by our children. Now they were off to start their lives together, we could be off, too – on our own, or in search of new partners.”

It’s bittersweet, this clash of romantic hope and lived experience. I am living it now, yo-yo-ing between the wedding plans of my daughter and son, both in their 20s, and the fragility and disappointment of my own long marriage. My days seem to be divided between excited chat about embryonic relationships that are absolutely perfect, and definitely going to last for ever, and remote and cold exchanges with a husband who has disentangled himself emotionally from me, and shows no signs of wanting to reconnect (I have suggested Relate many times; he is simply not interested).

To some extent, this juxtaposition of young love and old cynicism was ever thus: throughout time, weddings have featured, centre-stage, a loved-up duo who believe their devotion to one another will last for ever, while observing from the wings are two couples 30, 35 or more years down the line, battle-scarred by experience, and entirely devoid of rose-tinted spectacles – the parents of the bride and groom. And in the generation of “silver splitters”, these sixtysomethings are more likely than ever to be in the process of uncoupling, at the precise moment when their offspring are embracing the dream of lifelong partnership.

So how do we reconcile our cynicism – or, at best, our scepticism – for marriage and long-term love, with our offsprings’ enthusiasm to tie the knot, and embark on a life of seeming marital bliss? On one level, the phenomenon is heartwarming. It is testament, you could argue, to the resilience of the human spirit: however difficult our own marriages turned out to be, we war veterans look at our kids staring into each other’s eyes, and we melt inside. Yes, we think to ourselves, we made mistakes; we took paths that turned out to be wrong. Even, we think, we made fundamentally bad choices: we married the wrong men.

As a result, love was seriously skewed for us: but in the next generation – we nod our heads vigorously to this, while cheerily agreeing to a no-holds-barred expensive wedding – things will be different. True love will be theirs; the fairytale that eluded us will work for them, at last.

What hokum. As the survivor of a difficult marriage, this much I know: the biggest burden is the disappointment. And it is a disappointment born on my own wedding day in 1985: more than three decades later, the hopes of that morning still glint from the shadows. The expectations heaped on us, including by my in-laws whose own miserable marriage still had another two decades left to torture them, are the ghosts around the sad embers of our once-glowing fire.
So what can we do differently? Here’s the truth of it, as a wise friend said to me recently: in the 21st century, in a world in which women as well as men have choices and independence and long lives (all good), it will be increasingly difficult for one individual to answer the emotional, spiritual and physical needs of another, across many decades. Life is different now: we have bigger imaginations, we have higher expectations, we have more opportunities and, crucially, those opportunities continue well on into our 50s, 60s and 70s – and for all I know, into our 80s and 90s too. Even more significantly, we women have these opportunities: for men, they are less of a novelty. But their more widespread existence is the agent of seismic change in intimate relationships. We no longer need to put up with misery; we can alter the way we live.

I suggest that we, the parental generation, take a subtle lead in being honest with our twenty- and thirtysomethings about the realities of relationships, and love, and longevity, and choices. That we stop buying into the burgeoning and ever-more-elaborate wedding industry, a giant luxury liner that sails full-steam ahead, oblivious to the lifeboats and shipwrecks all around it in the water. At least begin to ask questions of the commercial interest that operates that liner, of its intentions and its fallout (not to mention its profits). There is more than coincidence, surely, in the way we seem to invest more and more resources in marriages that are less and less likely to survive.

How we introduce these notes of caution into our children’s lives is a much more difficult task. As parents, we want nothing more than happiness for our offspring: none of us wants to burst their bubble, at the precise moment it is so expanded.

As so often with parenting, though, we have to take the longer view. Sometimes I think that, even though my children may not understand or welcome some of the messages they get from me now, with me in my mid-50s and them in their mid-20s, there may be moments in the future when what I said, or how I behaved, suddenly makes sense. Parenting means filling your children’s backpack with supplies, and some of the supplies down the bottom of the bag may not be needed for many years to come.

One important factor in all this was raised by Sylvia Brownrigg in these pages earlier this year, and it is this: children are not interested in their parents’ relationships. They’re not interested in their parents’ marriage (beyond hoping that it is incident-free, and as calm as possible) and they are certainly not interested in their parents’ other relationships, if those happen or are ongoing. So we cannot weigh them down with the detail of why our marriages are failing, or unhappy, or disappointing – and yet, we must somehow signal to them that life is a long journey, and that it may be a mistake to invest too much in one central relationship on into the far distant future.

We are pioneers, us fifty- and sixtysomething mothers; we are walking a tightrope, and it is difficult to get the balance right. Sometimes we wobble; sometimes we fall right off. But the fact that we are walking the tightrope at all is the important bit. We are trying to be authentic, to our burnt-out marriages and to ourselves, as well as to our children and the realities of their future.

And choices cut both ways, too. Remember those mothers at the wedding party? My friend, as I say, is now divorced; but the bridegroom’s parents are having counselling, and have not ruled out the possibility of sharing their lives again.

Being more ambitious for ourselves doesn’t mean our marriages can’t survive, but it does mean a bad marriage can only survive if it can change. And that surely is the message, and the hope, we want to give our children, as they taste the realities of long-term love, or long-term what-was-once-love, and what just possibly might be love once again.

What To Do After You Graduate College

Gary Vaynerchuk

I’m scared. I’m scared because I know exactly what happens around this month every year. There are so many of you who have graduated (or will be graduating) and still have no idea what you want to do with your life. And you know what? That’s ok! Most people don’t. You shouldn’t be stressed about that. What I’m scared about is that you don’t realize that you are entering the greatest 5-year window of your life.

If you are 22 years old, regardless if you’re graduating from college or not, there are two things you should keep in mind. The first is to acknowledge that you are entering some of the greatest years of your life. The second is that this is the moment when you don’t go practical—don’t take the “safe” route. This is NOT the time to get the job Mom always wanted you to get. This is NOT the time to try to maximize as much money as you can make so you can save up to buy a sick ride. This IS the time, however, to realize that you have a five-year window (three for some, eight for others) for you to attack the life that you want to win.

Something else that scares me is the naïveté of what the world is like after graduation. I am by no means saying that “winning” is going to be easy. It’s not. What you’ve been doing for the last 16 years is easy. Classes and school are easy because they’re structured. The world? It’s hard. It changes every day.

The fact is that the world is going to be exactly the way it is going to be without regard to the way you thought it would be, think it should be, or whatever big plans you’ve already made for yourself. Your parents might have already told you it’ll be one way, but they don’t really know. They just want you to do what they think is best, which usually means avoiding big risks. But, what you need to recognize is that now is the time when you can afford to take those risks.

What I wrote above is going to contradict what I’m about to tell you now. Even though the real world is hard, the next five years of your life will be the opposite. These will be the best and easiest years of your life because it’s your chance to attack what you love and try out what you want to do. Why? Because you don’t have all the baggage.

Look, I understand you might have college loans. I respect that financial debt is a real hardship. You may have to live up to the expectations of your parents. That’s mentally hard—fake hard. You may have many other obligations, but this time is exactly when you can live with 4 roommates in a basement and eat fast food.

Most of you don’t have children yet. Most of you are not married and have not yet promised your life to someone else. So, this is the time before the world has sucked out all your hopes and dreams. You still have this window—the next five years to help you achieve your goals.

Time is the number one asset and now is when you have the most flexibility to use it.

I’m sure some people will leave comments about their loans or whatever other financial obligations they might have. Again, I respect that. But one way or the other, that loan is going to be there whether you build something for yourself or not in these five years. I truly believe that you can wake up on your 26th or 27th birthday, start being practical, and still pay off your loans and any other debts. While I’m sure those obligations might have compounded interest, leaving the opportunity of “going for it” in those five years (especially if you have entrepreneurial DNA) is a mistake and actually lacks practicality.

Yet, so many of you are so hungry for short term gains right after college. For example, you would rather take the job that maximizes your pay at $3,000 more a year, despite the fact that you would have enjoyed a lower paying job more suited for you. For what? For a new iPhone? A slightly nicer apartment? You get to live life one time.

(By the way, you can work at night! This is when you put in your 18 hours a day to make the life that you want happen. That’s practicality.)

Promise me, all you youngsters who are reading this, that you understand that the land grab for happiness starts right now. You don’t have to worry about getting “that job.” What you should do is go and travel and learn. Go and start that business you always wanted. Travel with those three friends and start that band. This is the time to be massively risk oriented. There will be plenty of time to be risk averse later. Now is the time to understand what’s actually happening and map your behavior to something that will impact you for the next 80 years of your life.

When you are in your early 20s, this is when you can grind at your highest level because you don’t have the baggage that comes later in life. It’s harder for the 42 years olds to listen to this advice. At that point, you can’t just wake up tomorrow and say “let’s go” because little Sally has soccer practice and you have a million other things that are holding you down.

If you are lucky enough to be graduating today without any clue what about what you want to do with your future, no one’s ever been luckier than you. Please recognize that.

Why boarding schools produce bad leaders

Nick Duffell in The Guardian

In Britain, the link between private boarding education and leadership is gold-plated. If their parents can afford it, children are sent away from home to walk a well-trodden path that leads straight from boarding school through Oxbridge to high office in institutions such as the judiciary, the army, the City and, especially, government. Our prime minister was only seven when he was sent away to board at Heatherdown preparatory school in Berkshire. Like so many of the men who hold leadership roles in Britain, he learned to adapt his young character to survive both the loss of his family and the demands of boarding school culture. The psychological impact of these formative experiences on Cameron and other boys who grow up to occupy positions of great power and responsibility cannot be overstated. It leaves them ill-prepared for relationships in the adult world and the nation with a cadre of leaders who perpetuate a culture of elitism, bullying and misogyny affecting the whole of society.

Nevertheless, this golden path is as sure today as it was 100 years ago, when men from such backgrounds led us into a disastrous war; it is familiar, sometimes mocked, but taken for granted. But it is less well known that costly, elite boarding consistently turns out people who appear much more competent than they actually are. They are particularly deficient in non-rational skills, such as those needed to sustain relationships, and are not, in fact, well-equipped to be leaders in today's world.

I have been doing psychotherapy with ex-boarders for 25 years and I am a former boarding-school teacher and boarder. My pioneering study of privileged abandonment always sparks controversy: so embedded in British life is boarding that many struggle to see beyond the elitism and understand its impact. The prevalence of institutionalised abuse is finally emerging to public scrutiny, but the effects of normalised parental neglect are more widespread and much less obvious. Am I saying, then, that David Cameron, and the majority of our ruling elite, were damaged by boarding?

It's complex. My studies show that children survive boarding by cutting off their feelings and constructing a defensively organised self that severely limits their later lives. Cameron, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Andrew Mitchell, Oliver Letwin et al tick all the boxes for being boarding-school survivors. For socially privileged children are forced into a deal not of their choosing, where a normal family-based childhood is traded for the hothousing of entitlement. Prematurely separated from home and family, from love and touch, they must speedily reinvent themselves as self-reliant pseudo-adults.

Paradoxically, they then struggle to properly mature, since the child who was not allowed to grow up organically gets stranded, as it were, inside them. In consequence, an abandoned child complex within such adults ends up running the show. This is why many British politicians appear so boyish. They are also reluctant to open their ranks to women, who are strangers to them and unconsciously held responsible for their abandonment by their mothers. With about two-thirds of the current cabinet from such a background, the political implications of this syndrome are huge – because it's the children inside the men running the country who are effectively in charge.

Boarding children invariably construct a survival personality that endures long after school and operates strategically. On rigid timetables, in rule-bound institutions, they must be ever alert to staying out of trouble. Crucially, they must not look unhappy, childish or foolish – in any way vulnerable – or they will be bullied by their peers. So they dissociate from all these qualities, project them out on to others, and develop duplicitous personalities that are on the run, which is why ex-boarders make the best spies.

Now attached to this internal structure instead of a parent, the boarding child survives, but takes into adulthood a permanent unconscious anxiety and will rarely develop what Daniel Goleman calls emotional intelligence. In adulthood he sticks to the same tactics: whenever he senses a threat of being made to look foolish, he will strike. We see this in Cameron's over-reaction to Angela Eagle MP, less than a year into his new job. "Calm down, dear!" the PM patronisingly insisted, as if she were the one upset and not he. The opposite benches loved it, of course, howling "Flashman!" (the public school bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays), but they never take on the cause of these leadership defects.

Bullying is inevitable and endemic in 24/7 institutions full of abandoned and frightened kids. Ex-boarders' partners often report that it ends up ruining home life, many years later. Bullying pervades British society, especially in politics and the media, but, like boarding, we normalise it. When, in 2011, Jeremy Clarkson ranted that he would have striking public-sector workers shot, he was even defended by Cameron – it was apparently a bit of fun. No prizes for guessing where both men learned their styles. And no wonder that the House of Commons, with its adversarial architecture of Victorian Gothic – just like a public school chapel – runs on polarised debate and bullying.

Strategic survival has many styles: bullying is one; others include keeping your head down, becoming a charming bumbler, or keeping an incongruently unruffled smile in place, like health secretary Jeremy Hunt, former head boy at Charterhouse. In a remarkable 1994 BBC documentary called The Making of Them, whose title I borrowed for my first book, young boarders were discreetly filmed over their first few weeks at prep school. Viewers can witness the "strategic survival personality" in the process of being built. "Boarding school," says nine-year-old Freddy, puffing himself up, putting on his Very Serious Face and staring at the camera, "has changed me, and the one thing I can do now is get used [to it]". This false independence, this display of pseudo-adult seriousness is as evident in the theatrical concern of Cameron as it was in Tony Blair. It displays the strategic duplicity learned in childhood; it is hard to get rid of, and, disastrously, deceives even its creator.

The social privilege of boarding is psychologically double-edged: it both creates shame that prevents sufferers from acknowledging their problems, as well as unconscious entitlement that explains why ex-boarder leaders are brittle and defensive while still projecting confidence. Boris is so supremely confident that he needs neither surname nor adult haircut; he trusts his buffoonery to distract the public from what Conrad Black called "a sly fox disguised as a teddy bear". On the steps of St Paul's, Boris commanded the Occupy movement: "In the name of God and Mammon, go!" Was it a lark – Boris doing Monty Python? Or a coded message, announcing someone who, for 10 years, heard the King James Bible read in chapel at Eton? Those who don't recognise this language, it suggests, have no right to be here, so they should just clear off.

This anachronistic entitlement cannot easily be renounced: it compensates for years without love, touch or family, for a personality under stress, for the lack of emotional, relational and sexual maturation. In my new book, Wounded Leaders, I trace the history of British elitism and the negative attitude towards children to colonial times and what I call the "rational man project", whose Victorian boarding schools were industrial power stations churning out stoic, superior leaders for the empire.

Recent evidence from neuroscience experts shows what a poor training for leaderships this actually is. In short, you cannot make good decisions without emotional information (Professor Antonio Damasio); nor grow a flexible brain without good attachments (Dr Sue Gerhardt); nor interpret facial signals if your heart has had to close down (Professor Stephen Porges); nor see the big picture if your brain has been fed on a strict diet of rationality (Dr Iain McGilchrist). These factors underpin Will Hutton's view that "the political judgments of the Tory party have, over the centuries, been almost continuously wrong".

With survival but not empathy on his school curriculum from age seven, Cameron is unlikely to make good decisions based on making relationships in Europe, as John Major could. He can talk of leading Europe, but not of belonging to it. Ex-boarder leaders cannot conceive of communal solutions, because they haven't had enough belonging at home to understand what it means. Instead, they are limited to esprit de corps with their own kind. In order to boost his standing with the rightwingers in his party, Cameron still thinks he can bully for concessions, make more supposedly "robust" vetos.

His European counterparts don't operate like this. Angela Merkel has held multiple fragile coalitions together through difficult times by means of her skill in relationships and collaboration. Though deadlocked at home, Barack Obama impressed both sides of British politics and in 2009 entered the hostile atmosphere of the Kremlin to befriend the then-president Dmitry Medvedev and make headway on a difficult disarmament treaty. In a subsequent meeting with the real power behind the throne, Obama invited Vladimir Putin to expound for an hour on what hadn't worked in recent Russian-American relationships, before responding. Despite their elitist education, and because of it, our own "wounded leaders" can't manage such statesmanship.

To change our politics, we'll have to change our education system. Today, most senior clinicians recognise boarding syndrome, several of whom recently signed a letter to the Observer calling for the end of early boarding. Its elitism ought to motivate the left. The Attlee government intended to disband the public schools, but not even Wilson's dared to. There's a cash problem: boarding is worth billions and has a massive lobby. Unlike most other European countries, our state does not contribute a per capita sum towards private education, so dismantling these schools, which still enjoy charitable status, would be costly. But can we really afford to sacrifice any more children for the sake of second-rate leadership?

Dealing with parents' mortality

Rohit Brijnath in The Straits Times

My father, 81, and I talk occasionally about his death. At breakfast he, not an ailing man, can turn into a prophet of doom amidst spoonfuls of cereal. "I have two years left," he will pronounce, to which I reply that his predictions are unreliable since he has been saying this for the past six years. My mother, 83, laughs and he smiles. We are all, impossibly, trying to meet death with some humour and grace.

I am sounding braver than I actually feel for the inevitability of a parent's death is like a shadow that walks quietly with most of us. A 40-year-old woman I met recently revealed that when her parents are asleep, she stands over their beds in the dark, waiting for a tiny movement, a proof of life. Mortality is life's most towering lesson, not to be feared but gradually understood.

My parents' eventual death is hardly a preoccupation for me but for those of us who live on foreign shores, it's always there, lingering on the outskirts of our daily lives. It is hard to explain the two-second terror of the surprise phone call from our homes far away. I answer with a question that is always tense and terse: "Everything OK?" My father replies: "Of course, beta (son)."

Death will come, and somehow, it will always be imperfect. In old Bollywood films, parents made long, weepy speeches about family and love and then their heads fell dramatically to the side. Reality is never so scripted. The devilry of distance - I live two flights from my parents - means that it is unlikely we will be home in time. We do not want our parents to linger and yet the heart attack's unpredictable finality leaves no time for farewell. We are presuming, of course, that there is such a thing as a graceful goodbye. Perhaps it is in how we live with them that is more vital.

I talk occasionally to my parents about death, not because I am morbid but because I am inquisitive about mortality and because I do not want them to be scared or alone. Yet I find it is they who reassure me.

They return from frequent funerals, friends gone and family lost, and speak with voice softer but spirit intact. My father retreats deeper into his sofa and philosophy and tells me: "The whole, wonderful, joyful, exhilarating business of evolution would not exist if we were immortal." There can rarely be an equanimity about death - we all fear pain and indignity on the way there and we all feel loss - but sometimes we might strive for an acceptance that all things must finish.
Few other struggles are as impartial as ageing and illness, and the mortality of a parent. Every friend I spoke to carried a separate apprehension. A banker told me she is unafraid and yet had already asked close friends to attend her parents' funerals. Emotionally and practically, she knows she will need support. An executive, her parents still together after 61 years, sinks as she considers one parent left behind, like an old, steadied ship whose moorings have been cruelly cut. A flinty investigative journalist, bound to her mother who is her only parent alive, wonders about her sanity once left alone.

We feel hesitant often to raise some subjects with our parents as if they are too impertinent or inconvenient and yet practicality has a place. Was a will written, a DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) ordered, all these seemingly minor matters which leave shaken families divided in emergency rooms. Do we know what our parents wish and how they want to go?

Clarity is the great courtesy that my friend Sharda's mother offered her: no life support, no unnecessary surgery. Another pal, Samar, has a paper packet at home given to him a while ago by his parents and only recently did he find the nerve to peek in. No religious rituals, his parents wrote; our bodies to be donated for medical purposes, they noted.

I found nothing grim in this but saw it instead as a gentle gift to their son by giving him answers to questions he cannot bear to ask. There was also in the giving of their bodies to science a beautiful, moral clarity. In their 80s, they had understood that in death, they might be able to do what so few of us can do while living: save a life.

Samar sees his parents every day and I call India every second day. In my wrestle with the eventual truth of a parent-less planet, I have learnt five things. The first is contact. To hear, see, touch. To talk and to learn. My father recently mentioned in conversation about the composers Johann Strauss Senior and Junior. I didn't tell him I thought there was only one. So thanks, dad.

Second, to speak your mind, to leave nothing unsaid, for in the sharing of love a relationship comes alive. Not everyone can find the words but regret is an incurable ache.

Third, mine them for stories, of where they came from, hardship they hurdled, love they found, museums they visited, people they became, dreams they left behind, times they lived in, fears they wore. If I don't write them down, then stories dim and histories die and there is nothing to carry forward.

Fourth, and this my mother is teaching me, is to respect choice. "Fight, fight" against age, against illness, we tell our parents, often selfishly, but not everything must be raged against. Dylan Thomas was wrong, sometimes you have to go gentle into that good night. Sometimes, life has been enough, a weariness comes to rest, all accounts are settled and people want to turn to the wall, away from life and slip away. As my closest friend, Namita, still grieving over a mother she recently lost, told me: "There is a great love in letting people go."

Fifth, and I am lousy at this, don't steal their autonomy and instead respect their choices, hear their opinions, let them be free to arrange the rhythms of their life. My brothers and I are always trying to buy our parents a TV, a fridge, as if we cannot fathom that their life does not need a new shine. Yet it is fine as it is. So what if the letters on my mother's keyboard wore away, she has not forgotten the unique order of this alphabet.

Still I search for clarity amidst the clutter of life's incessant questions. I wade, like us all, through the truths of ageing and loss. I think of a relative who cannot find a way to open cupboards and wander through the accumulated life of her parents she has recently lost. I am moved by a friend, a civil servant whose father passed away a while ago and who tells me: "I don't fear death. I feel I have had a fulfilling stint with my mum." We are, all of us, a forest of crooked trees, leaning on each other.

I find reassurance in the reality that my parents, hardly wealthy, not poor, have lived rich lives. My mother now sits with the stillness of a painting and reads. My father writes to me: "I am not frightened by death. I will be sad that I can no longer look at Michelangelo's David, Picasso's Guernica, listen to the cool jazz of Bill Evans' piano or smell the aroma of a beautiful woman!" Today he has gone, as he does many Sundays, to listen and learn from a younger man about his beloved Strauss and Bach and Mozart. To this music, always he comes alive.

Written your child’s personal statement yet? Get a move on...

It is now so difficult to isolate a child’s contribution, why not go straight to the source – start testing the parents?

 

Co-authorship seems to be the order of the day. Photograph: PhotoAlto / Alamy/Alamy


Catherine Bennett in The Guardian

For as long as I can remember, I have been fascinated by the importance attached to personal statements, written to a formula, and not by the candidates alone, as part of applications to British universities. The longer it persists, the more farcical, unfair – and excruciating for students – this requirement becomes.

Every year, experts on the process refine their advice and share disdainful lists of cliches that should never be used to start a personal statement, such as: “For as long as I can remember I have been fascinated” (used 196 times in 2013), or: “Nursing is a profession I have always looked upon with” (178 times), thereby adding to the self-consciousness of students required to appeal, in around 700 fresh and original – yet thoughtful and relevant – words, to admissions tutors, some of whom admit they never glance at these exercises in supplication.

And why, anyway, the horror of cliches? They are not, most of these 600,000 or so young applicants, applying for BAs in Being Martin Amis, in a world where originality of expression is the key to worldly success. You need only read one of George Osborne’s op-ed contributions, or cast your mind back to the Labour leadership hustings, to appreciate that 17-year-olds are being held to far higher standards than middle-aged politicians.

If Osborne can begin a piece: “Britain is firmly on the road to recovery, thanks to the hard graft of working people”, and Cameron blither: “I’m so passionate”, and Corbyn believe that “Jeff wants to know” constitutes a compelling barb, why shouldn’t an aspiring nurse begin a personal statement with: “Nursing is a profession I have always looked upon with...”? It can only mean, in the nurse’s case, that in the event of a tiebreak between two equally qualified candidates, a more dashingly phrased as opposed to unvarnished expression of intent would be taken to indicate superior potential. How much British politics has to learn.

Now, to add to the pressure on our future accountants and chemists to demonstrate tenacity without tedium, vivacity without froth, research suggests that much of the advice given by schools to young statement writers is wrong.

Arriving just after the final deadline for this year’s Ucas submissions, a report for the Sutton Trust, written by Dr Steven Jones of Manchester University, may well cause consternation among candidates who have just put, for example, a declaration of commitment, carefully stripped of cliches, before proof of intellectual curiosity.

It was not unexpected, perhaps, that support with personal statements, routine in independent schools, should help students from comprehensives make more successful applications to highly selective universities. But Jones also discovered that some existing guidance may be counterproductive. “Admissions tutors,” he writes, “tend to value focused and sustained analysis of a specific topic of interest or case study rather than broad statements about a subject or attempts to make the statement more ‘personal’.”

He shows how one candidate’s expression of enthusiasm (“I am particularly interested in Victorian literature”), and explanation – “the social constraints and etiquette of the time are vividly portrayed, yet the novels of this period remain timeless” – was considered “bland” by an admissions tutor. “There is a much stronger way to put this tension.”

No doubt. Then again, the hapless candidate, who has, we note, commendably avoided the now deprecated word “passion”, is only aiming to please. It could be that the author is capable of stronger phraseology, on the febrile, emotionally explosive content of Victorian literature, but reluctant to go over the top, since she is applying for five different courses, in places offering conflicting advice on personal statements. Perhaps this application’s authors have been studying the university website, which holds up as exemplary the hardly less tepid: “Computing is a thought-provoking subject, covering a range of disciplines and has permeated every aspect of modern life.”

The writers might be focusing, instead, on transferable and relevant skills: “Your child can also mention how their current qualifications have broadened their knowledge,” the University of Bath tells parents. Except that qualifications speak for themselves. So don’t bother. Don’t mention sport. Try to be interesting, instead. OK, do mention sport. It’s character-building. Ditto the Duke of Edinburgh award, which has no conceivable connection with your passion for, sorry, interest in, medieval history. “This is your opportunity to sell yourself,” is Ucas’s charming summary of this exercise, one which appears to have few, if any, parallels outside the UK. So grab attention. But don’t be glib. Or a prat. “We want you to be different, but not TOO different,” one tutor told Which?, a whimsical preoccupation, perhaps, when English teenagers are ranked the world’s worst for literacy and not much better at maths.

But what is uniform, in all this advice, is the assumption that the statement is co-authored. The mothers who ask you: “Have you done yours yet?”, who urge early submission, to beat the crowds, and who go on websites to share about “personal statement hell”, are doing no more than comply with Ucas expectations, as they follow through on years of help with homework, securing work experience, renting violins. “Do ask people that you trust, like your teacher/adviser or parent/carer to read through what you have written and give you feedback,” Ucas says, advice that is unlikely to help tutors with the true state of applicant literacy.

Having never, mercifully, been invited to collaborate on a personal statement, I can’t be sure how tempting it is to tinker, redraft, maybe reword the thing, in line with Ucas hints and its stern warnings on plagiarism. Very, probably, when your child is effectively competing with adults, including dedicated coaches in independent schools, brilliant stay-at-home mothers and others willing to pay £150 for a shop-bought item, from, say, Oxbridge Personal Statements. Liberal instructions to parents – “Your child’s personal statement needs to create a strong impression” – confirm that its editing is, indeed, your duty.

While coursework is being phased out in GCSEs and A-levels, for reasons having to do with the lamentable shortage, in many homes, of parents qualified to write 3,000 words on Macbeth, personal statements continue to make parental competence, finances and cultural capital a factor in applications to universities whose graduates will dominate the professions. So long as inequality of access remains a theme in higher education, the survival of the personal statement, in its cheat-friendly, whole-family format, must vitiate all corrective projects.

Whatever happens to the Sutton Trust’s recommendations, that personal statements be demystified, perhaps reformed, its findings on admissions tutor preferences guarantee one thing: formal analytical passages, modelled on Dr Jones’s examples, will be all the rage in next year’s statements.

In fact, since adults are likely to supervise this development, it would save precious student time, time perhaps better devoted to numeracy and literacy, if the universities invited parents to submit the resulting creations to Ucas under their own names, with the child merely confirming it is the adult’s own, unaided work.