What do you understand by marriage reform? What all can be done right now?

Question : What do you understand by marriage reform? What all can be done right now?

Shri Shri Thakur : We can start immediately by soliciting consent of a  girl before her marriage. We can induce such impression in a girl's mind that she should not think of or show husbandly love for a man before her marriage. She should not select husband by coming in contact with a man as she may become sexually inclined there.¹ Those who are superior in all respect like race, varna ², heredity³, knowledge, behaviour etc., she must be respectful towards them. If needed, an offer can be made only to such a man towards whom her heart gets inclined through devotion and admiration,  thereby bringing herself contentment. We should at once do that much which brings in a natural repulsion or hatred inside her for a man who, being indifferent towards his Ideal, tries to entice⁴ her or gives her offer.

 Foot notes:

¹ – "Unfortunately the path of human passion and the path of marriage is strewn with too much wreckage to justify man's faith in the intuition of love. In fact if our affection is real, we should refuse to embark upon the sea of matrimony, steered solely by Cupid, without clearing Papers from Science." – Dr Magnus Hirschfeld

² – Einstein said, " Being both a father and teacher, I know we can teach our children nothing. We can transmit to them neither our knowledge of life nor of mathematics."
   "But", I interjected, "Nature crystallises our experiences. The experience of one generation are the instincts of the next".

  " Ah!"  Einstein remarked, "That is true; but it takes nature ten thousand or ten millions of years to transmit inherited experience or character." - 'Glimpses of the Great' by Viereck

³ – "Mendel discovered that certain kinds of character ('unit character') behave in a particular way in inheritance. They do not blend or break up or average off, but persist in their intactness in a certain percentage of the offspring generation after generation." - Sir I. A. Thomson

"The laws of heredity can be relied on with complete confidence." - Leonard Darwin

"Whatever may be thought of genius, there can be no doubt that intelligence tends to run in the families." - B. Russell

⁴ – "Man must run after glory, woman after man" - Napoleon

"The more exhausted men become, the more they lose the power to lead women or to arouse her nature which is essentially passive." - G. S. Hall

 [Ref: Nana Prasange Vol.1, Ninth Edition, Dec-2001, Page 62-64]

[Note : The original transcript is in Bengali and is translated here by Subrata Ghosh. The words, highlighted in bold are, however, originally used by Shri Shri Thakur Himself]