 Gosh guys seeing this taped up heart on stage just made me realize that my heart is beating really really fast right now But I'm not here to talk about my heart. I'm here to talk about the heart of this nation and all of your hearts. I Am here to talk about a revolution This is not the IT revolution which Bangalore is so famous for nor is it the economic growth revolution Which this country so famous for I'm gonna speak to you about a love revolution Which is lurking silently underneath both of these For the past year to research my new book I have been traversing this country from Shalong to Kochi from Bangalore to Bombay Speaking to hundreds of people who make up the great Indian middle class and What I have seen is a startling change in attitude and a generation gap the size of a crater The first thing to explode with a generation gap is the concept of the Indian arranged marriage this small switch from Arranged marriage to love marriage actually means a whole deal It means that a social revolution is taking place Which will change forever the way our families are structured our communities are formed and the way love and sex in This country are handled young Indian Indians today are very keenly interested in romance in love and self exploration and discovery The relationship landscape in this country has changed more in the past 10 years than it has in the past 10,000 I'm gonna take the case of my own family a typical Brahmin middle-class family from the state of Uttar Pradesh to illustrate this These are my grandparents They were married for 70 years till my dad the jail grandmother passed away two years ago This is literally the first time they met on their wedding day These are my parents They're celebrating their 33rd marriage anniversary today. They met twice before they got married This is my older sister who was married 10 years ago in an arranged come love marriage or an introduction marriage Which is a modern-day morph of the of the traditional Indian marriage system This is my younger sister who was just married in a pure arranged marriage a few months ago in a pure arranged marriage Yes, sorry love marriage a few months ago. So now I'm next and clearly the pressure is on being from, you know, typical Indian family And so I have to sort of think about all of these things very carefully What I realized is that India is clearly falling in love But there are certain hidden costs to this revolution as there always are the first cost is divorce Divorce in India today stands at 10% which is less than a lot of countries, but what is alarming is a steady increase States like Kerala have seen an increase of 400% in the past decade States like Punjab in Haryana have seen an increase of a hundred and fifty percent in the past decade Delhi is as expected the divorce capital of India and About a year ago of 10 in 1990. There was one divorce court today. There are 16 I'm not sure about Bangalore, but I'm sure it's not as bad as New Delhi where I'm from But so all of these things all the statistics led me to really think very carefully about arranged marriage And I started digging a little bit more. I also found that pre-marital sex has Increased to 75 percent 10 years ago. It was less than 30 percent This has led in quadrupling of teenage pregnancy rates and tripling of abortion rates We have no social welfare system in this country. Our family is our social welfare But as this the joint family explodes with their love revolution splitting into nuclear families What's going to happen to the elders of our society in a country where there are no old age homes? Single statistics show that single parent families have doubled in the past five years Clearly I realized that this is a fascinating subject and I began running more tests I studied about 5,000 cases of divorce and what I found was fascinating 70% of these were these divorces were initiated in love marriage My grandfather always a stickler for tradition used to say that if two people fall in love and get married Then what stops them from falling out of love and breaking the marriage and breaking the marriage means breaking up the family Arrange marriage on the other hand was a concept that I'd always thought was really old-fashioned Archaic and to be honestly, you know, very really quite regressive but After seeing the statistics I began reconsidering Arrange marriage is a union between not just two people but between two families It is based on a sense of communal trust commitment and duty I'm gonna end with a short analogy to you know help you think about it a little bit better I'm gonna relate all of this to the stock market. So love love marriage is sort of like a stock You know, it's a little bit volatile. It can go up. It can go down. It can just go bust and on the other hand arranged marriage is a little bit like a bond it You know you sort of form a bond between two families between two people It's perhaps it's less volatile surely and perhaps has less reward than a stock But it's really something to think about I Consider myself to be a modern cosmopolitan woman and as sort of the pressure goes as I told you in the rest of my family Is married including my younger sister and you know what that means for an Indian family But as the pressure and me sort of goes on I ask myself, what do I really want? I say that I want a little bit of tradition I want to preserve the gems of wisdom that have come down and I also want a little bit of love So what arranged marriage has made me realize that maybe just maybe you don't need to kiss too many frogs to find your prince Thank you