How India's 'cool' singles are actually more miserable than ever

Not too many years ago when I became single, I found myself on the other side of green that I had looked at longingly during nearly five years of living together. Like a chicken cramped in the coop for too long, I emerged gingerly, uncertain of my newfound freedom. I was tentative and I blinked awkwardly into the sunshine.

In all those years I had forgotten how accessible many of life's luxuries could be. I could whistle. I could snore. I could sing in the shower. I could strut about naked or fully clothed. Walk out of the front door whenever I wanted to and return without having to think up the "five Ws" (Who? What? When? Where? Why?).

I did not break into cold sweat when I sidled up to a pretty girl at a party and heavens did not fall if she came home to check out my book collection. In short, I had been released. I was reborn. I was all agog to flock with my kind. It was not hard. With urban Indians pushing marriage well into their 30s, there is a growing population of singles in the cities. There are now even single clubs in India's big metropolises, places where I thought singles meet to exchange notes on bliss and freedom.

But at a party in one of Gurgaon's mushrooming high-rises, my fantasies lay as shattered as the landscape before me. Puffing dispassionately on their cigarettes, a group, disinterested in the dance, booze, music and all the merry-making of the party going on inside, huddled together in a balcony bemoaning their collective fate: singlehood.

They were regulars at the single clubs. The bash was thrown by a couple, who after years of desperate single clubs and dating sites hopping had found each other. They were celebrating their first anniversary. They were thrilled to bits and were serving single malts to friends, family and gatecrashers.

That's the strange reality. Singles don't want to be single. Whether a committed long-term relationship or marriage, singles just want to be hitched. To be single in India is an anathema. The stigma is probably second only to divorce. It's an affliction every single man or woman wants to get rid of as fast as possible.

And singles clubs in India are not places of celebration as I had naively assumed. They are whining clubs where sad desperate singles come to bemoan their wretched single status hoping anxiously to meet desperate singles like themselves and get hitched.Singles are not living it up but float about waif-like, seeking out husbands or wives in boardrooms, in birthday parties, in weddings, in Facebook friend-lists or dating sites like Tinder. To their credit they display amazing perseverance like taking time-bound gym, yoga or pilates memberships, (to be discontinued promptly after the goal - marriage - is achieved.)

Despite our cultural constructs of love, singles, like everyone else, are driven by the evolutionary need to breed. But not having the avenue to do so, their plight is indeed a sorry one. It's sorrier for women up against the ticking "biological clock".

As the steep Indian population graph indicates, every Indian religiously fulfils his or her evolutionary goading. Those that cannot find success even after well-timed romps in the bed, queue up at one of the many IVF clinics sprouting everywhere in the country. Everyone wants a baby. Even this very liberal, unconventional single friend of mine who during a desultory WhatsApp chat one day, let it slip, "Sanjay do you think you could give me your sperms? I want to have a child and I would like it to have your genes".

There was no expression of affection, no proposal of marriage or even a hint at good old lovemaking. I was not offended. But I had to politely decline.

Truth be told, there are no singles in India. Indians go directly from living with their parents to living with their spouse. There is no experience of "being single" in that sense of the word. Fully functional adults well into their 30s choose to shack up with their parents and continue to do so after marriage.

Call it a utopian cliché but being single means not depending on others for happiness. To be single means to love but not out of a sense of duty as it often happens in matrimony, where after a few years one even fornicates with each not because of any sexual impulse but to rebuild that ebbing bond.

To be single means to care but not in the narrow, exclusive way. It means to extend the scope of your affections. On a broader level it means to live without the buttress of ideologies, beliefs and cosy mutual back-scratching cliques.

To be single means not to conform. There is no grander act of non-conformism than to keep at bay the one institution that is the biggest symbol of conformism - marriage.

But there is a great emotional and psychological security in conforming. The widespread cheer the recent legalisation of gay marriages in US reveals just that. You are not "gay enough" until you are endorsed at the altar.

The world allows development of no idioms for singlehood. Getting married is often the easier way out. And thereby hangs a tale.