… happily ever after

It is a little known fact that good old Sleeping Beauty, the achetype for women everywhere (primarily because she lay dormant until a random Handsome Prince arrived to awaken and whisk away from drab dormancy), did not want to be awakened nor did she particular want to be whisked off.

What people do not realize is that before she was “Sleeping Beauty”, a purely subjective name provided to her by the ancestors of modern marketers, the crone-like matrons of her time, as a marketing gimmick to attrack the target audience, i.e. princes of a marryable age from far and wide before she got too old and became a burden on her parents (ancestors of the modern Pakistani parent), she was simply Aurora and she had no grand ambitions nor any driving ambition. And that was okay.

As she lay there, immersed in her dream-based world, she was perfectly happy and had no need for a man to come by and drag her out to reality, where the flowers die after blooming and the sun sets and disappears.

And so, as she was awakened and dragged off to some distant kingdom while all and sundry rejoiced, she couldn’t help thinking “is this what I really wanted?”, but it was already too late. And they lived happily ever after because once the bride is gone to “apna ghar”, nobody bothered to keep in touch and check on if she was actually happy. Details like that would spoil the happy ending.