The cards have been distributed and the flux of outstation
guests has begun. Our house has become a marketplace with ladies singing hymns
all the time and making me sit in for pooja
from time to time.
Dad, brother, cousins, uncles are all working on arranging
for pick up and drop of guests that have started coming in (and want to travel
in and around Bangalore – Tirupati, Puttapatti, and Mysore being popular choices).
Sister and aunts are meanwhile busy sorting out the Sangeet day’s sequence of events.
All I have to do is work on grooming myself and ensuring
that my clothes are all set for the entire charade. So here’s how this week’s
been:
An awesome “bachelor’s party” at Gokarna over the weekend. There’s
no “exciting” news from the trip, but I achieved what I set out to do –
completely disconnect from every single thought and just enjoy the sheer
nothingness that seeps into you in Gokarna. This truly laid back temple town has some reeaaalllly
shallow beaches leading into the Arabian Sea. The people here are lovely, but
the greatest boon for tourists are the beach-shacks lining the popular Om Beach
and Kudle Beach. These shacks seem to have had the good fortune of entertaining
foreign tourists very early on – probably the original Goan hippies who had to leave
nearby Goa because of the loud and blatant place that it has now become.
One town’s loss is another’s gain. These tourists seem to
have taught the locals running the beach shacks how to make some heavenly
dishes from a very wide range of cuisines. Of course, the local cuisine just
hits the spot each time too.
I’m really glad Shuntu and BD came along, and that Rahul took
the trouble of coming all the way from Mumbai to join us even if it was for
just a day. After coming back, it took about 24 hours for the nothingness to
exit out of my system, and the sheer madness that is an Indian wedding began to
creep in.
Yesterday, there was a Ganesh pooja because in Hindu
mythology, every auspicious occasion should begin by asking for Lord Ganesha’s
blessing. Today, we pray to the souls of deceased family members to attend the
wedding and bless the couple and watch over them and their future progeny.
In the meantime, I got a facial done in the morning! Under
normal circumstances, I would never have agreed for it, but a marriage changes
a man. Or maybe it’s the conditioning by the women. Whatever the cause, I actually
enjoyed it. It was bloody relaxing… and now my face is all smooth and shiny! All
I needed was a head massage and a body massage, and I would go back to Gokarna
mode.
There were a few other events, like drawing lines in a mound
of salt, and tieing together seven loops of holy
red thread. This “rope” made out of the seven loops ties together will be
tied onto the bride’s hair after the marriage. I couldn’t find out why. Its sad that only the traditions have been retained and for the most part, the reason behind each detail is lost over the ages.
The one thing I love about Hindu marriage is that it is one
of the few traditions that seems to have retained every detail right from the
age of the Vedas. Reading Osho made
me believe that during the age of the Vedas,
there was an immense amount of scientific research behind spirituality. I
believe the openness of Hinduism was so liberating that people realized that
spirituality, not religion or riches is the true path. This led to knowledge
discovery and experimentation with that knowledge. People either blindly
followed the actions of the few who had attained Nirvana (or enlightenment, or inner
peace etc) or maybe they realized that surrounding oneself with a certain combination
of sights, smells and (most importantly) sounds led to attaining Nirvana.
That is the only explanation I could find for the myriad shlokas, along with specific type and
color of flowers and food that our elite “Brahmins” stress upon for various
occasions.
These things are often grossly substituted by “words”
instead of sounds, artificially
manufactured incense sticks instead of natural smells and painted walls instead
of the beautiful colors of flowers or crushed spices.
One reason for this might be that when “caste systems” came
into existence, it was more due to necessity than anything else. Scholars who
researched any subject, including spirituality were the Brahmins, people who were more comfortable using brawn instead of
brain found suitable roles and those carrying out similar roles were part of
that “caste”.
Some of these scholars probably went “rogue” and started
asking for favors/wealth from the rest of the castes who worked hard to build material
wealth but needed the scholars’ help to build spiritual wealth. The rest, as
they say, is politics.
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