The other day I was watching a TV serial. It was the story of two families related to each other via marriage. The boy and girl married to each other are the lone child of their parents. The family of the son feels fortunate, proud and superior to the family of the daughter to whom their son is married to.
The son-in-law was tormenting his wife's family. The guy's parents are proud that their son makes some extra bucks by greasing a few palms. They boast to the girl's parents that how lucky she is to have their son as her husband. But the girl and her parents are unhappy with this liason. Sounds quite familiar, an episode from a typical Indian family SAAS-BAHU (Mother-in-law, Daughter-in-aw) soap opera.
No, you are wrong. It is from a Chinese serial with English subtitles which I stumbled upon while flipping channels the other day. It provided a rare menu into the Manchurian Milieu as the curious me watched it to have a peek into the secretive Chinese society - a country which in 1978 was at par with India, now 4 times India's GDP and already a Superpower flexing its economic and military muscle. But I was surprised that their social fabric and fraca is not so different from us, even now.
No wonder, the Chinese recently relaxed their one child norm, by extending it to two. The strictly implemented one child principle in China has contributed to a skewed male-female ratio, heavily favored to the former. It has landed the Chinese in not so sweet, but sour soup. The result - Per a recent report are at least 50 million males in China who cannot marry. Solution is very simple. They can take a cue from the Americans, where many states have legalized gay Marriage.
The similarities doesn't end there. If corruption and other fraudulent practises are epidemic in India, it is rampant in China. But unlike India, every year scores in China are hung until death on corruption charges. Still China which could control Coronavirus but can't control corruption in a nation where without the knowledge and connivance of the authorities, one may not able to fart privately without the government sniffing at you.
In contrast, forget about any Capital punishment, rarely in India any one gets convicted on corruption charges. If it happens so in rarest of the rare cases, most convictions comes after 20-25 years - a classic case of justice delayed is justice denied.
The population of China now estimated to be 1.4 billion, followed by India's 1.3 billion. It wont be long before we catch up with them, but it might take a few more years now that they have allowed couples to have upto couple of kids. Yet, it was interesting to see the social fabric of two neighbors sharing a civilization of 3000 years isn't a whole lot different.
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