Once, a student asked his teacher, “What is love?” The teacher said, “In order to answer your question, you need to do one small exercise, come on and go to the wheat field and choose the biggest flower-spike (sitta, as it is called in Punjab, the top-most part of the plant which contains grains) of a wheat plant and when you find that, come back and show it to me. But the rule is : you can go through them only once and cannot turn back to pluck the flower-spike from the plant which you have already passed-by….. !”
The student went to the field, went thru the first row, he saw one big flower-spike on a wheat plant, but he wondered…. may be there is still a bigger one on the other side of the field…… Then he saw another bigger one…. but may be, he can still find another bigger one, with more lush-green grains enshrined in the flower-spike of another wheat plant ….. and so on.
Later, when he finished more than half of the wheat field, a realisation dawned on him that now the wheat plants do not have that much big flower-spikes as the previous ones he had already seen and were somewhat bigger / better and they have already passed by. He knew that he has missed the biggest one, and thus, he regretted.
“Now, please tell, me what is marriage, then?” the student put his next question to the teacher.
The teacher said, “In order to answer your question, you again have to do a small exercise, go to the maze-corn field and select the biggest corn and come back. But the rule is the same : you can go through them only once but can’t turn back to pluck the maze-corn from the plant which you have already left or passed by ….. “
The student went to the maze-corn field, but this time, he was more careful not to repeat the previous mistake, when he reached in the middle of the field, he has realised that the best quality corn has been already left behind. But, as he had to decide, he picked-up one medium size corn, which appeared quite good to him that he felt somewhat satisfied with, and come back to the teacher.
The teacher told him, “This time you have brought a corn…. which is just nice, medium size in equality, it is neither too good nor too bad…. but you had faith and belief that this is the best one that you could choose in this field at that point of time amongst the thousands of maze-corns hanging in this filed ….. This is called Marriage…… an institution where one has to make compromises time and again, and you also do not know what type of and how you have to make such compromises …… as and when the situation demands ….. “
