Weddings are flamboyant events, I'm sure everyone agrees. It's all about celebration and a certain amount of pomp and show is expected so that the on-lookers can go green with envy :) I'd been to one such ostentatious wedding. An Indian (it's OK to be presumptuous, in case you thought it was Hindu :)) was marrying a Russian Jew. The ceremony was performed in both Vedic and Jewish traditions. This of course woke up the blogger in me. I went into raptures as I had something to think and 'ink' about :)
The Jewish part of the ceremony was sweet and more importantly 'short'. In about forty five minutes they were pronounced man and wife and showered with blessings to live happily ever after. An interesting part of this ceremony was when the groom was asked to stomp on a glass vase to prove that his marriage was indeed not ephemeral. As Physics would brand it, marriage is meant to be a 'chemical reaction', it cannot be reversed.
Coming to the Hindu part of the ceremony......well what can I say... :) All the Sanskrit chants were refurbished to suit the requirements of this country (the specifics are unimportant) and the invitees. The aspect, however, that baffled me the most was how Vedic rituals could be bent to suit the requirements of geographical locations and a variety of faiths. In the sitcom, 'Friends' Monica tells her betrothed Chandler that she wants a 'marriage' and not a 'wedding'. Wedding plans are subjective to the helm, of course, but I wish at times that parents or in general all elders could think of other goals for their existence and not treat the marriages of their off springs as the object of spending all their lives' savings on.
The current economy has had it's effect on the marriage 'market' too (after all it IS a market, is it not!!) A huge crisis has fallen upon parents' of all 'available' singles. It has apparently become exceedingly difficult to find suitors because of the ailing economy. Wow! And here I was......thinking that marriage and more commonly, matters of the heart are untouched by extraneous forces!!!
So...these days on facebook updates and google's buzz.....a very common status message is this- 'there are only 1141 tigers remaining in the world, save them'. George Bernard Shaw said 'When a man wants to kill a tiger it's called sport, when a tiger wants to kill a man it's called ferocity'. This quote is of course courtesy google. Can you imagine what would happen if Google started putting up a price!! The human race is yet to fathom the perils of taking things for granted.
Whenever the talk is about tigers, I am reminded of Jim Corbett. He wrote this book called The Man Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. The story (a sort of auto-biography) is about how he killed a terrorizing man-eating leopard in the Himalayas with his famous 'shot in the dark' and how he is left with mixed emotions at the end of it all. Almost everything in this world leaves us feeling mixed. And here I was being told....that we live in a binary world......where everything is either 0 or 1..... :)
The Jewish part of the ceremony was sweet and more importantly 'short'. In about forty five minutes they were pronounced man and wife and showered with blessings to live happily ever after. An interesting part of this ceremony was when the groom was asked to stomp on a glass vase to prove that his marriage was indeed not ephemeral. As Physics would brand it, marriage is meant to be a 'chemical reaction', it cannot be reversed.
Coming to the Hindu part of the ceremony......well what can I say... :) All the Sanskrit chants were refurbished to suit the requirements of this country (the specifics are unimportant) and the invitees. The aspect, however, that baffled me the most was how Vedic rituals could be bent to suit the requirements of geographical locations and a variety of faiths. In the sitcom, 'Friends' Monica tells her betrothed Chandler that she wants a 'marriage' and not a 'wedding'. Wedding plans are subjective to the helm, of course, but I wish at times that parents or in general all elders could think of other goals for their existence and not treat the marriages of their off springs as the object of spending all their lives' savings on.
The current economy has had it's effect on the marriage 'market' too (after all it IS a market, is it not!!) A huge crisis has fallen upon parents' of all 'available' singles. It has apparently become exceedingly difficult to find suitors because of the ailing economy. Wow! And here I was......thinking that marriage and more commonly, matters of the heart are untouched by extraneous forces!!!
So...these days on facebook updates and google's buzz.....a very common status message is this- 'there are only 1141 tigers remaining in the world, save them'. George Bernard Shaw said 'When a man wants to kill a tiger it's called sport, when a tiger wants to kill a man it's called ferocity'. This quote is of course courtesy google. Can you imagine what would happen if Google started putting up a price!! The human race is yet to fathom the perils of taking things for granted.
Whenever the talk is about tigers, I am reminded of Jim Corbett. He wrote this book called The Man Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. The story (a sort of auto-biography) is about how he killed a terrorizing man-eating leopard in the Himalayas with his famous 'shot in the dark' and how he is left with mixed emotions at the end of it all. Almost everything in this world leaves us feeling mixed. And here I was being told....that we live in a binary world......where everything is either 0 or 1..... :)
super! especially the bit about parents' / elders' sole purpose of existance is to get their kids married off with too much pomp and show! spot on man... spot on..
ReplyDeletekeep it going kriths.. one hell of an awesome post.. :)
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