marriage rituals

DISCLAIMER: People with strong and vehement antiquated notions, keep off this :)

I love marriages for FOOD, vetti vambu and nice sight seeing, ladies at their best and gents trying to cope up with their counterparts and look winsome :)

But when it comes to rituals, i seriously don't understand the whole point behind so much fuss over nothing at all.

1. It all starts with a function called VERADHAM The bride, groom and their parents gotta starve whole morning, and keep on chanting ranting chanting wat ever the iyer mama says ( the iyer mama will have endless cups of juice, payaasam etc). Then the iyer mamas eat to their tummy full, after which only the bride and groom gotta eat. poor souls. Definitely i wont have this when i get married :) no compromise on food.

2.Then comes MAAPILAI AZHAIPPUThe bride's people have to wait and wait till the groom's people arrive at the hall, then treat them as though its God incarnation that has arrived and then the groom goes on a tour of the locality in a ota car, the whole point is, when he roams about in an open car, if someone who sees the groom and recognises him to be fraudulent or something, the marriage can be stopped it seems:) The groom is exhibited in the dim evening light by seven , where no one can see properly, and mostly today's grooms are NRIs dunno how he can be recognised as a bad person in the agrahaaram :) No such thing is done for the Bride:)

3.Tats it for the day. Next day early morning is KAASI YATHRAIThe groom says he wants to attain sanyasam and wants to get settled at Kasi, the holy place in India and starts off with an umbrella and slippers( both gifted by the bride's parents). The bride's father, irrespective of his age, falls at the feet of the groom and says he can have his daughter's hand in marriage and need not attain sanyasin. Then washes the groom's feet on a silver plate. I simply dont understand the whole point behind this. Why cant the groom's father do the same to the girl??

4.KANYAA DHAANAMHere the bride has to sit on her father's lap and the groom ties the thaali. A mother is one who introduces light ,after resting in the darkness in her womb for ten months,sacrifices herself for the growth of the child,at every stage, shares the feelings of an adolescent kid more than a father, but unfortunately, she has no role to play in the marriage, except rendering hospitality to the groom's family and guests. Why cant we create a revolution by sitting on mother's lap during kanyaa dhaanam??

5.RECEPTIONUnder the heavy weight of maalai for four to five hours, and artificially posing for photos with everyone present again for four to five hrs, you definitely will flop into bed having no time for anything else :)

Marriages should be a confluence of two minds, amidst a very closed circle of friends and relatives, without much huccus and ballyhoo.

marriages?!?!?!

Yippee, my cousin is getting married next week. I am so happy. I really love marriages in the sense being a passive spectator and just ignoring all rituals and not taking them to heart or trying to understand the logic behind each and every custom(next post on marriage customs:))

This is the only occasion where i can meet all my perimmas. Seeing five sisters together and listening to all gossip and masala stuff wow priceless :)

Real fun to hear the maamis comment on each others jewellery.

maami1:endi vimala indha necklace enga di vaangina? prince jewellery ah thanga maaligai ah?
maami2:enga aathukaarar engaloda 23 wedding anniversary ku vaangi koduthar de. made to order. indha maadri design ellam kadaila chumma kadaikaadhu. edho naanga regular customer naala seekrama pudichamadhri panni koduthar.
maami1:oho apdiyaa, evlo di aachu?
maami2:Rs 15,500. anaal naanga therijavaa naala 15,000 discount.Rs500 thaan koduthom :)

I just laughed my ass off at this. These ladies believe everything and anything when it comes to jewellery or discount :)

Then when the vadhyar asks for anything , people will just go bustling about the whole place, as if its on fire and run about here and there, as if a moments delay will stop the marriage :)

The most interesting part of marriage is FOOD. My god really worth marrying a hundred times :).I really really hate it when the video man comes to the dining hall and zooms in and out on my banana leaf. I DONT CARE. FOOD FIRST REST NEXT. Anyways, no one is going to comment on how i gobbled up stuff when they see the marriage video. All eyes will be set on ponnu-maapilai:)

Eagerly waiting for Aug 27th :)

rotting again...

DISCLAIMER: READ AT YOUR OWN RISK

I have become Ms.Devadass( of course not started drinking yet ) for the past couple of days. SPent some quality time with friends on the pretext of BHEL entrance exam but all was spolied by a mail from WIPRO.
MY TENTATIVE DATE OF JOINING IS JANUARY MAN. I DESPERATELY HOPE IT IS 2009 JAN :)
I mean my parents really adore me being at home. I try to be my idle best not doing anything, waking up at 11 am not folding bedsheets not cleaning house, drinking coffee without brushing, not taking bath for two or three days and so on.. Trying my best to irritate them so that they chuck me outta the house one day, someday and say'go do some work'. But no :( I don think that day will ever come. They want me to enjoy my holidays. Really frustrating having a first class with distinction at hand and still being at home, in again the land of nowhere. Cha, why doesnt wipro have mercy on us. I mean i agree i am not that great at programming or wanna show off my software talents, but atleast some place to go from morn 10 till evening 5 . Some reason to be proud of completing engineering without arrears. Why should the US market go down darn this year, why cant it be next year or the year before , why damn 2008? Too bugged to write anymore :( Will surely fight this tough phase and come outta this moribund lugubrious feeling. Preeti will rock ( atleast by jan :))

Pot Pourri

This post is something about everything but means nothing :) If you are busy doing nothing, chalo , pado..

1. I was busy for the past couple of days packing for my sis to leave her back in hostel(darn, have to wait for thirty more days to be with her), and we went by car from Shimoga to Erode( approx. 600 km), and got a super driver who had:

* absolutely no road sense( when i asked him to turn left, he turned right and vice versa, or was it some pichle janam ka badla, i dunno)
* the license to drive only in Karnataka and not outside it. Which he told us when we crossed TN border and said"if we get caught you gotta pay 6k fine, i hope its ok with you", my mom started makin a list of stuff she will do to all the gods if we reach home in proper piece.
* the sick habit for honking at the rate of 30 honks/min
*being raining heavily, when asked to stop to attned nature's inevitable call, he will surely stop after some 1 hr ( shoo, dont ask me what i did then :P)

Mom s prayers, and my little lucky stars brought us all back to the bush safely ( except my sis ofcourse :( )

2. Mr.Murphy has entered my life again. At my home now, I got 24 hrs power, but TV doesn work and my room fan's angry with me and has stopped fanning me :( and net speed is now 50kbps, though its broadband.Mr Murphy, thoda dayaa karo and go away :)

3. I usually dont go buying dressses, but bought one after a real long time and gave it to a tailor. when he stitched it and gave me bought, it was not beautiful anymore( it wont be even if i wear... still :) ) he had made cuts and stiches at 'odd places' and calls tat fashion!!! man... all wierdoes around..

4. I really apply for a job with great enthu and vigour, but when it comes to preparing for the aptitude and stuff, I become a malingerer. hmmm. god save me :)

I ll crap later. dunno how long this will take to get loaded :(

on cloud nine:)

Things have gone very smooth for the past couple of days. I have been a cynic, sycophant,jittery,itchy,twitchy and what not for quite sometime but the last couple of days was a turn of tables. For once, Mr.Murphy did go wrong. Its like impossible and unbelievable that life can be this enjoyable( its like Aiswarya Rai Bachchan getting her best actress award :P). Why so??? read on...

1. My parents went to bring my sis from hostel for her first vacation , leaving me in charge of home and grandparents. Its really nice to be head and responsible and stuff with no one to tell me what to do, and me being the boss :)I really love temporary responsibilities :)

2. Have been grumbling for quite sometime that I have not seen the sun, then only realised sun timings here is from 6 am to 10 am(those are real odd hours for me to be awake in the normal course).As rightly said, Man is the most peculiar creature of all, he always wants for what is not .At Trichy I wanted rains, mann vaasanai,small puddles of water where i can jump and splash water around and get reprimanded, small puddles also to make tiny boats and enjoy their sail,but now, I want bright sun, for clothes to dry, for vit D , for an evening walk, for the frogs to stop croaking away to glory and also for keeping me more active.

3. If you call watching a Karan Johar movie is suicide, then try drinking your own prepared coffee first thing in the morn. It ll take you five-ten minutes to sink in the fact and console yourself that,"yeah this should be coffee" and by the time you drink it, it'd have become ice cold coffee( that anyways tastes better). But the brighter side is, you have learnt to prepare coffee that is definite to shoo away unwanted guests and pests :)

4. It is priceless to taste the food prepared by patti, and further more, when served by her, with utmost love and care. I just hope these halcyon days last forever.

5. MY SIS IS FINALLY HOME. That is the peak of my positive attitude and happiness. But i dread the next four days where she s gonna ask me a myriad doubts and other stuff in MP and C. She is having a wonderful hostel life and hostel food too :). I really feel like re-studying 11th and 12th ( yeah, you heard me right, re-studying :P) after listening to her fun stories and super hostel life. I really really miss my friends at college, my seniors, my ground floor, my room :(

6. All in all, life rocks :)

Mosquitoes....they "suck"...

Now you might wonder "has this girl gone really mad to write about mosquitoes of all things???", yes, you are absolutely right, a mosquito can drive any sane person crazy.
I am still stuck up in the wonderful land of nowhere, a village and i have not yet got accustomed to this luxury-less lifestyle( luxury in my dictionary means- having power and telephone connection at least 9/24 hrs a day, i.e, the time i am awake in a day).As usual yesterday night there was power cut. Usually i sleep off before the power cut so that i don't have to bear the tortures of the pest, god has bestowed me with the thickest skin ( perhaps the buffalo got the copyright stolen from me:)) so presence of the pest after i doze off does not make any difference. but yesterday, I was unfortunately awake till ten pm. As already said I got thick skin and am really very generous so I seriously don't mind them sucking my precious blood ( woh bhi kya yaad rakhenge yaar:P).
The problem comes when I am fighting with my pillow trying to get sleep, and they suck my blood and come and report promptly in my ears at a flap rate of 50/sec and say ,"see i just got stronger, thanks pal,I want just a little more",really gets me unnerved. I am 5.4" tall and fifty odd kgs but am really helpless and at the mercy of the weightless height less creature.
I don't have the dexterity to swat them away, I cant use all out as there is no power, I cant use HIT spray since they seem to have got immune to it, and if i use mosquito coils, my dad will disown me. He is allergic to its smell.
I did quite a bit of research on mosquitoes this morning and found out the following stuff about them:

Chemical sensors-
mosquitoes can sense carbon dioxide and lactic acid up to 100 feet (36 meters) away. Mammals and birds gives off these gases as part of their normal breathing. Certain chemicals in sweat also seem to attract mosquitoes (people who don't sweat much don't get nearly as many mosquito bites).

Visual sensors -
if you are wearing clothing that contrasts with the background, and especially if you move while wearing that clothing, mosquitoes can see you and zero in on you. It's a good bet that anything moving is "alive", and therefore full of blood, so this is a good strategy.

Heat sensors -
Mosquitoes can detect heat, so they can find warm-blooded mammals and birds very easily once they get close enough.

I just wish I could conquer those sensors and say "GOTCHA!!!!".
On the lighter side, when ever you are down or feel useless or feel you have not done anything great, compare yourself to the mosquito. At least you don't go about drinking people's blood and getting their wrath.If you have mercy on me and get a solution to this mosquito menace, please help!!!!

what a man!!!!

I was at the railway reservation counter ( a place i really hate to go to since we gotta wait in never ending queues esp in our trichy fort staion). The two ladies at the counter will keep on chatting about everything on earth ranging from their two days ago to two days hence menu, how they feel tortured by missing their favorite mega serials, how they spent the whole weekend to purchase the midnight blue with sneha priya green bordered saree( i swear i got no clue as to what colour that is:)) and we will be poor souls waiting in the queue for eons.The lunch timing is from 2pm -2 15 pm but they will stop issuing tickets from 1 45 pm itself.
In this agitated state with the sun mercilessly blessing us, we were waiting. Suddenly out of thin air a police inspector went directly to the ticket counter. All of us got really pissed off but did not feel like antagonising him scared of his uniform.A middle aged man ( i ll call him Hero) went to him and:

Hero: Excuse me sir, there is a long queue and we have been waiting for a long whil so please follow rules.

Police: (no response)

Hero: Did you hear me?

Police: yeah.Hope you are seeing to whom you are speaking.

Hero : yes, I am. I am also planning to lodge a complaint to higher authorities saying you are out on your personal work during duty time in your uniform and also not following rules.

Police: Naan aalum katchi aalu ( i belong to the ruling party).

I could not believe my eyes. This hero just scribbled his address on a piece of paper and gave it to him and said " unnala mudinjadha aprama panniko, ippo ne queue la nillu".Ultimately, he got his tickets only in queue.

I was stupefied by his guts but he has to be practical and cannot go in search of trouble this way. This Anniyanish attitude will surely not work out in this era.