Marrige is function of time and people. M = f(P*T)

          While many people do not believe there is such a thing as “finding your perfectly matched soul mate,” I've seen plenty of evidence that we can become each other’s soul mates as the result of a deep and lasting love relationship. If humans can develop finely honed skills in music, athletics, and language arts, wouldn't it be equally possible for them to become perfectly suited and completely irreplaceable to their spouses? A musical genius develops perfect pitch and can create soul-stirring compositions of musical beauty.Someone who becomes fluent in a language “thinks” in that language—there is no effortful retrieval once the language becomes second nature.  

For a couple love and respect for each other have been practised so repeatedly that thoughts of separation or divorce are completely alien. As in case of Indian marriages, if not love, then respect for each other is so well practiced that thoughts of separation or divorce are completely off the mind. Both of them become indispensable to each other over a period of time. The relationship becomes so multifaceted that none can live happily while the other is unhappy.Two individuals who have become perfect for and irreplaceable to each other have become soul mates. In this way, soul mates become each other’s “one in a billion perfect match.” This for me is the form that a soul mate takes in one’s life. 

As I typically say, arrange-married couples are launched by their families in an atmosphere of great extravaganza, these couples pass a threshold of being indispensable for each too early. This transition by the way would be different for each couple. Perhaps this shift is the result of successful reconnection because of the two families which too get married to each other along with their children. However this is not a passive process. Marriages don't get better a time passes alone, but they get better as and when two partners continue to treat each other with love, respect and affection. So marriage is a function of time and people. M=f(T*P);

As a result of this, partners must continue to treat each other with love and respect , despite the challenges life brings.

Whenever two individuals become each other’s soul mate, the remaining years of marriage are grounded in security and a rare and special form of intimacy. As I see it, during the soul mate phase of a well-nurtured marriage, the developmental tasks would be to celebrate and make meaning of the life you have lived together, operating as sacred keepers of each other’s thought processes, and to become generative together towards others. One hallmark of couples who have passed into the “soul mate” phase of their marriage is that they continually bless and inspire others through the way they treat each other and those around them.

In the mid stages of marriage, couples realize that just love for each other is not enough. They need to work and toil so hard to live a perfect life and fulfill the aspirations of their kids. This is the period when the priorities suddenly change. For e.g if they have kids, then the mother's allegiance is always towards the kid and the man is busy working hard, earning dollars or rupees to fulfill the aspirations of his childhood. Both mom and dad live the life they couldn't through the kid. During this period, the time spent with each other is minimal. The communication happens through the kid, but the love for each other remains.

In the final stages of life, the love that can be felt is a deeper, more satisfying level of love than anything that anyone encounters in the first few years of the relationship. In one sense, to make a comparison between the experiences of love at these two relationship stages is like comparing apples and oranges. I would argue that love of a deep and meaningful kind is only possible when based on real knowledge. If being loved is based on being known for who you are and cherished despite your flaws, then the feelings one has during the initial goody goody phase of a relationship can’t be love. These feelings would be some combination of other pleasurable things like hope and attraction or may be physical pleasures. If you doubt this, then consider the difference between your first crush or first love and your real marriage which you had endured all these years, the person who has been by your side through thick and thin, who has invested his/her time and energy in you.

As an analogy, imagine the way it would feel to move into your dream home, full of excitement and thrilling plans for the future (in parallel to the goody goody  phase of a relationship). Now, imagine the feelings of love and attachment you would have about the same home after making every square inch of the home suited to your personal tastes and filling it with layer upon layer of joyful memories over the course of a full and rich life (in parallel to the tested romanticism phase). The feelings you would have in either case cannot be compared as equals, but I would guess that most of us would cry harder if the home full of memories caught fire.  

So what is the reason behind the hight success rate of Indian marriages? It is the time and energy which two people invest in each other along with their families, which makes it a highly stable framework in place anywhere in the world.

Arvind Subramanian,CEA Vs Raghuram Rajan RBI Gov. Different tales.....

                 When Arvind Subramanian was appointed as CEA, the decision was hailed and supported from all the quarters. Former FM P Chidambaram, mentioned that Subramanian had for long been a choice for this post. He was appointed as CEA,despite the fact that he had been highly critical of NDA's budget in 2014. This showed that the government was ready to accept criticism and for a course correction in the eventuality. There have been many hits and misses in last 18 months. One of hits have been we have achieved a greater macro economic stability. Most of this had been aided by lower imports and lower commodity prices. We need to achieve a savings rate of 36% as it was in the high growth era, low inflation(in the range of 4-6%) and million jobs per month. The budget needs to be focussed on agriculture, infrastructure and education. This is where the CEA and RBI governor can play an important role. With two of these finest minds in the world, we need no other economist to prepare a blueprint for the economy and fire it on all cylinders.

Here is a good article on The Hindu comparing the stints of both these personalities in their respective roles so far.

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Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) Arvind Subramanian started 2015 on an over-optimistic note. He is likely to have ended it in disappointment. The economy is slowing down: in the first six months of the financial year, real GDP grew 7.2 per cent, slower than the 7.5 per cent in the corresponding earlier-year period. In 2016-17 too, GDP growth will not be significantly greater unless some specific steps are taken, the CEA has said. Thankfully, there are few takers in the government for the main measure he is suggesting: a further pause on fiscal deficit reduction.

About a year ago, barely months into his job in the Finance Ministry, Dr. Subramanian projected a sharp recovery with growth of up to 8.1-8.5 per cent. He forecast the acceleration even though he did not expect any big-bang reforms (on this count, his forecast was correct). In his scheme of things, the spurt in growth would come from incremental policy pushes, such as to subsidy reforms, direct benefit transfers, and financial inclusion of the poor.

The brave outlook underestimated the weakness in the exports sector. It relied on the Rs. 70,000 crore of public investment that was earmarked in the year’s budget — as suggested by him — for building infrastructure to stimulate private investments. The stimulus he had designed was implemented. It proved insufficient to generate the growth impulses needed to kick-start the over $2 trillion economy and rekindle animal spirits gone numb in the dying years of the United Progressive Alliance’s 10-year stint due to policy paralysis and corruption scandals.

As things stand, it seems unlikely that industrial growth will cross 5 per cent. Growth in lending by banks to industry, a proxy for investment sentiment, hasn’t budged from a 20-year low. Corporate balance sheets are burdened with mountains of debt. The worst exports performance since 1952-53 is inevitable.

A government not shy of its business-friendly credentials should have picked up these stress signals early on and administered the remedies, but its mandarins were too excited: international agencies had declared that 2015 was going to be the year in which India would race past China (the Chinese economy is about five times as large as India’s) to be the fastest growing economy in the world.

It was. But that this had probably more to do with China slowing down rather than India picking up, and the stark difference in size made the comparison between the two economies irrelevant. But the cheerleaders among bureaucrats and ministers couldn’t be bothered with technical minutiae — all that mattered was that India is a bright spot in a gloomy global economy.

Why is growth slowing?

In the boom years during the UPA government’s tenure, four engines had powered the economy. Of those, just two are still running: government investments and private consumption. Exports and private investments, the other two, are out of steam. The UPA years saw an investment boom, which was bound to turn sooner or later, and has.

Lower borrowing costs could restart the investments cycle but the hands of the Reserve Bank of India Governor, Raghuram Rajan, are tied. An agreement that the government and the RBI signed a year ago has made controlling inflation the main objective of monetary policy. The agreement formalised a policy goal that the central bank has always pursued anyway, except that it set the targets in terms of consumer price inflation. Moreover, government-owned public sector banks have been slow to pass on to borrowers the rate reductions that Dr. Rajan has announced. Banks are a cartel and keep interest rates high because higher interest rates mean bigger profits.

Dr. Rajan is well on course to bring inflation within the 6 per cent target that the government set around the same time the CEA made his cheery growth forecast. In fact, the ‘rock star’ Governor, with whom the CEA has worked closely earlier in the International Monetary Fund, has had an excellent year. India was still one of the ‘fragile five economies’ when the year began. Yet, it is the only one to have come out of the phase of heightened currency volatility and current account deficit instability that characterised the group. Besides, the purse-string managers of the government’s budget in North Block, who haven’t yet let its fiscal deficit slip, Dr. Rajan too deserves credit for restoring India’s macroeconomic stability, which the government hasn’t quite leveraged to push growth, just as it has been caught sitting on its hands despite the favourable global trends in oil and commodity prices.

On growth, Dr. Rajan has been spot on. By the end of the summer, he had cut the Reserve Bank’s GDP growth projection for the year not once but twice. In July, even as Dr. Subramanian was sticking to 8.1-8.5 per cent, Dr. Rajan’s call was 7.4 per cent.

The overconfidence in Delhi lasted till the last day of November, when new official data released, revealed a slowdown instead of the promised smart recovery. Within hours, the government cut its growth projection to 7.5 per cent.

In the following weeks, the CEA did a few mea culpas on earlier positions, raised fresh concerns about the state of the economy and declared the official data puzzling and unusually difficult to interpret. And he called for reassessing the government’s commitment to fiscal deficit reduction.

Environment for lower interest rates

Abandoning the committed path for fiscal rectitude now will put macroeconomic stability at risk. It might end up hurting growth rather than supporting it with the government and the RBI working at cross purposes. How? To fund a wider deficit, the government will have to borrow more, which could push up interest rates and crowd out private borrowers.

Inflation might have been tamed but the Reserve Bank’s key interest rate, despite cuts adding up to 125 basis points in 12 months, is still high for a revival in investments and growth. Although higher public investments are desirable, the government needs to do all it can to create the environment for lower interest rates, not higher.

Public investments can be increased without deferring deficit reduction, though. There is a perceptible improvement in the quality of government spending with a shift towards capital expenditure. This can be built upon. Savings from efficiency in spending remain an underrated resource. The government ought to cross the political hurdles for strategic disinvestment. If the government’s fiscal consolidation would distract from the demand in the economy, much of its spending will also add to it. Government employees’ salaries and pensions are set to rise as the Seventh Pay Commission award is accepted and disbursed. The hikes are bound to result in a surge in demand for goods and services. So are other transfers from the government.

The growth and the outlook won’t seem as lacklustre if Dr. Subramanian had corrected his forecast earlier, as Dr. Rajan had. He publicly differed with Dr. Rajan and took a bet on accelerating growth, and it looks as if he is going to lose the bet.

Source: The Hindu