before someone wrote this article.

As it was explained to me by someone of that culture, in India, it is a parent's duty to see their kids married. Much like getting your kids into college here, but the responsibility continues beyond. Also, much like not making sure your kid does well in school, not getting your kid married reflects poorly on you - it's like a huge dereliction of duty.

Thus, this make sense. It's not about you, it's about them.

a tiny fraction of indians may be OK with gay marriages, but in a country where homosexuality is still a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison, though no one actually has landed up in a prison for being gay, theres still a long way to go before gays are accepted as being a "normal" part of society. The civil society in India should seriously start moving such stupid statutes from law books and provide more space for gays in society and the arts to end the hypocrisy of "India doesnt have gays". Especially Bollywood movies must grow out of caricatures of limp wristed effeminate gay men who are a butt of ridicule of the hero and his busty girl.

One of the powerful declarations submitted to the San Francisco Superior Court in the first stage of the California litigation was not from a gay or lesbian persion but from a mother -- Chinese-American, I think -- who expressed feelings like this. The gist was "my friends don't know what a civil union is. They've never heard of domestic partnership. I want to tell them my daughter is married."

The article tries to be relevant as experience of an immigrant, however it quickly and blatantly digresses to create a colonial style fairy tale caricature in exotic land of aunts. It is one thing when merchants were amazed by stories of snake charmers, it is another when a seller of literature concocts the innocence to a so called marriage between 30 year old men for fascination of adopted kids .

The article brings up specter of a dumb Indian "Aunt" - Can Indian Aunt recognize the difference between a marriage and this ruling in california ? As it happens to concocted characters, this dumb bengali aunt can potentially degrade to a horror story in future- a fanatic bitch sticking to orthodox ways against the way of civilized california gays - if and when she dares to express her opposition to this hizacking of institution of marriage.

Appropriation of experience of colony has remained as a distinct post-colonial phenomena. The innocence, snake charmers and horrors of superstition has been replaced by new words. The western travelers stories have give away to a breed of Indians who specialize in selling stories of colony and exotic to the west. The Indian aunt looking for an adopted kid when his son sleeps naked with another boy is just a new character of fiction.

Last Indian prime minister was a batchelor

. There are respectable institutions of bachelor hood, just as family is respected. The author is misleading when he sacks the immigrant families as dumb ones who just understand marriage - Immigrant families just understand marriage, even same-sex marriage, more easily that singlehood.

The notion of "Gay" does not exist in less-developed countries, like India, simply because they are less developed. The whole "concept" of homosexuality is around a hundred years old (I think that's Foucault), whereas homoerotic behavior has been here as far back as we go. We have to distinguish between a lifestyle centered around sexuality/gender (homosexuality), essentially a new development in our psycho-social evolution and common in countries like the US, and homoeroticism where people go off to boink same sex pals and gals before returning to their families where they boink for kids.

As a military friend told me about a comment an Afghani soldier told him: "men are for pleasure, women for babies." This is a pretty common historical reality, especially when thinking of ancient Greece (and Sparta is usually the prime example), and also more common in the Africa-American male population that most people realize (the "down-low," as it's called) (. . . not going to mention the psycho-social development issues there for fear of irrational reprisal). These soldiers, for example, are not at all "gay," in the same way that Alexander the Great wasn't "gay," simply because the word applies to a different sociological/psychological reality (our closest concept would be bi-sexual, but it's not a good fit).

I personally don't like the idea of Gay people "marrying" (which I take to be a specifically religious act before society and God); I'm all for gay unions properly recognized by the state (and re an above comment: why would we want to change the statutes of our society based on what some old Chinese lady want to tell her relatives in China?!). The reason I think we should be for Gay unions and against gay marriages is that marriage reinforces the traditional paradigm of understanding relationships and gay-civil-union recognizes the development away from the sexual double-time of the ancient world and, apparently, Afghani soldiers and some black men. If Chinese people don't have an idea what "gay" means, let them learn where their own future is, just as they learned to drink coke, wear jeans, go to the movies and get fat.

Sandip Roy's article is heart-warming with its examples of parents in a "third-world" country helping their children get married to others of the same sex. Most Indian parents today are not that liberated.

The real subject matter of the California ruling is not the inclusion of gays. It is that the current marriage laws are unfair: they provide tax, custody, insurance, and inheritance benefits to married people vs. singles or divorced people. Over the years, this unfair discrimination has not abated. The least-bad option, at this point, is to broaden marriage and its discriminatory legal benefits so much that a large percentage of the population can get them.

Personally, I would want a world where the word "marriage" refers to heterosexual coupling, and carries no extra legal benefits--and no connotation of moral superiority. But I applaud the recent California ruling; it is creating a "more perfect," although far from perfect, union.

(Disclosure: I am happily married to a woman, and have two kids.)

Aneesh Shrikhande

Farmington, CT