Amit Goes Blogging

In the summer of 1999, my parents had some unusual plans: we were to spend our vacations 1000 km away from home at Chitrakut where Shree Ram spent 11 years of his 14-year exile. There was an ashram in Chitrakut and the Swamiji heading the ashram was also a Yoga exponent. My mother had been suffering from arthritis. This made father very anxious and he did everything possible to alleviate her suffering. But, her resistance proved a hurdle in my father’s attempts to restore her health. He could neither pull her into the habit of morning-walk nor make her take to the treadmill by her bed. When Father bought her costly, light-weight sneakers, she poked fun at him saying that he was stepping into dotage. While mother was a mother to her kids, Father knew that his dear wife craves no less attention. He decided to take her to the ashram at Chitrakut. Again, she wouldn't relent without a fuss. She said she would neither stay at the ashram nor at a hotel. She wanted freedom for her chi...

Indian weddings are very cordial and flamboyant affair. Careful planning and money go into making them successful, which means avoiding a fiasco. The close relatives of both the parties undergo countless difficulties to ensure that the wedding is highly spoken of for years to come. Also, the larger the turn out, the greater is one’s social standing. In the olden days, when parties entering an alliance lived in the same town or village, the marriage procession proceeded from the boy’s house to the girl’s place amid a lot of fanfare. The wedding expenses are on the girl’s side and the boy’s relatives make it a point to manage a large turn out at the wedding and make things cumbersome for the girl’s side. These traditional pranks put the patience and sociability of the bride’s family to test.  I shall share an incident of one wedding party that had some great plans of putting the bride’s side to test. The girl's family lived in a city and the boy's family was from a small t...