You write well, Rajiv. There are some minor errors, but the essay flows. What is the purpose of this essay? Is it an assignment of some sort?
Let me point out a couple of things that caught my eye before delving into commentary on the content.
Our marriages are these ships and frankly,
You'll need a comma after the word "ships" because the rest of the sentence could stand on its own.
; but
Don't use a semicolon and a conjunction together. Either use a comma and then a conjunction or a semicolon with no conjunction when you are combining two independent clauses.
of ?
You have a space between your sentences and the question marks. Why ?
Because the man by tradition accepts the matrimonial bond completely, and the person his wife is.
I am not sure what you are trying to say here. I think the meaning gets lost in the semantics.
has an independent earning
independent earnings
And thinks to herself that what had kept women subjugated in earlier times was not having an independent source of income.
This is an incomplete sentence.
Even though this is hardly how the man would have thought, or taken advantage of except in rare cases.
Another incomplete sentence
Then pushing along this line of thought further
Add a comma after this phrase.
Instead chose the slippery slope of tasting an over-abundance of independence.
This sentence needs a subject. Who chose?
it's values
No apostrophe
If you do not do the acceptable thing
Comma after this clause
You employ the second-person tense throughout the essay. Generally speaking, formal English essays don't use the first or second persons. At times, I wondered if this was a personal entreaty to your wife to obey. When you used "we," "our," and "you," I found myself wanting to know just who these people were.
Okay, now I will move on to commentary on the content. I ask what the purpose of this essay is because I can't imagine a situation in which it would be appropriate (unless you are freelancing for a chauvinistic organization).
You say:
for men, little has changed from what was earlier
I would argue that A LOT has changed for men. The women of India have changed and that certainly impacts the men of India. I am sure that the new-found freedoms have created a turbulence in the marital waters for Indian couples, but other than subservience from the women, I don't see any solutions in your essay. At one point, you say: "It would be wrong to ask women to go back to the earlier ways of being uneducated and lacking the earning power," but you don't have me, as a reader, convinced that you believe this. Are you suggesting that Indian women earn BAs, BSs, MAs, and PhDs only until they get their MRSes? What should Indian men being doing to adapt to the new reality of wage-earning wives? Shouldn't they be supportive, even proud, of their wives' successes? You mention Indian men nourishing the family, but I get the sense that you mean that merely in a bringing-home-the-bacon manner. I don't see you or your ilk nourishing the family by taking the kids to doctors' appointments, cooking dinner, cleaning a toilet, or changing diapers. I imagine that the working women of India feel oppressed if they are expected to put in fifty hours a week at work, do all the shopping, cooking, cleaning, AND dote on a husband who sees himself as a maharaja.
You seem to imply in your second post that westerners do not hold marriage in high regard. I suppose that would be true if one were to look merely at divorce statistics, but I think it is an unfair and condescending assumption that westerners hold marriage in low regard. An American or European would look at your essay and think that Indian men care only about personal prestige and power instead of the happiness of their wives or the stability of their marriages.
Seriously, is this for your own practice, for an assignment, or for some publication called
Misogynists Weekly? I think understanding the purpose of the essay would help us as readers to understand a bit better where you are coming from.
ON A SIDE NOTE: HI LIN!
*Smooch*