Trends we can see : 1

This is going to be one audacious try. But, I guess that is fine. It is going to be lots of fun writing this and watching whether my feel is coming out right or not. OK. What is this about? I am going to try and figure out the underlying trends based on what I am reading / seeing in news / magazines / TV and so on and so forth.

I am not going to pretend these are "Mega trends"

My takes for the first trend spotting are as follows:

1. I was reading the sex survey 2010 in The India Today. More and more boldness is what we see. We also see that women are ready to come more and more out of their marriages. You also see the second and third marriages happening more often.

Sunandha Pushkar marries for the third time and is happy about it.

Shashi Tharoor, on his part, also gets into his third with Sunanda and is also happy and open about it.

Vanita Vijaykumar, the daughter of tamil actor Vijaykumar, has 2 sons from her first marriage and one from her second. While the second and third marriages are seemingly on the raise, there are single mothers who taut their wards.


Sushmita sen has two children and is not even married once. Both are adopted children. The 1994 Miss Universe is quite happy about it.

You look at the other side of this spectrum, you get to see that gays and lesbians are scoring important legal victories.

You also see lots of couples living in and absolutely happy about it.

You see Kareena and Saif living together.

And, so do Bipasha and John Abraham.

So, a very simple first trend : Marriage as an age old institution is in trouble. Deep trouble.

When time is scarce, when you don't know whether you can commit, when you don't know how much you would love a person, when your career is important and is more important to you than anything else, and when the woman is as free as the man in terms of both economic and how open she can be to the world, it seems as if there is no need for marriage. So, will the number of marriages come down? I think it will. Would living in go up? Yes. It will. So, what happens to children? I think they will learn to cope up with the uncertainty of living with a stranger who is the current 'father'. What will this trend lead to? What are the opportunities it will bring to marketing people and the cinema dudes? What problems will it bring to those and all of us? How, as a parent, I would take it? These are questions which require some deliberations, debates and discussions.