The Big Change

For the world population that is not following up with my super-fast changing life, I am now married! Yes, went through all of the traditional arranged marriage routine.

Past few months… So much has happened!

Numerous heavy bull fights with parents when the tabooed topic of marriage was initiated; mom’s strong persuasion; crying out to friends on how painful and irritating the discussions were; Progress in career and hectic stressful 16 hour working days in office; Finally mom’s victory in finding ‘The Guy’ for me and days of convincing me to get married; my first retaliation to the very idea of marriage; Dad’s pitching in on the project of convincing me for marriage; my first embarrassed gtalk chat with Him at 12 in the night; our first few hesitant and awkward talks over the phone; our first meet in McDs’ in Velachery; His first gift of a Fasttrack watch; nice McDs' Burgers and ice tea :P; Both of us nodding a ‘Qabool’ to “Us”; Our Engagement; His visits to Chennai and mine to Blore; Wedding plans n shopping; More and more office work in the peak; Kadalai with fiancé; More Shopping; Advices from every Tom Dick and Harry; More work; Driving in Chennai heat and increasing traffic due to Chennai Metro; More kadalai; More and more unending shopping… and it went on till the end on my bachelorette life!

The marriage itself was a blur. Lots of people telling me when to do what, what to do how, how to do why, why… there was almost never an answer to that other than – “That’s the tradition, and it has to be done that way. End of discussion.” I was specifically instructed to bundle up my rationality and logic thinking and throw it away until the marriage got over. Rule number 1 was DO NOT ASK QUESTIONS.

Though a lot of people came to the wedding and told me that the food was great, I was hardly able to have a bit of it. Loads of controversies; several rituals – both meaningful and meaningless; many Saree changes; numerous pics – by professional photographer and relatives/friends; now and then pampering :P; parlour ladies and their resolution to make me look unrecognizable; Flowers everywhere; And Jewels too; Hymns, Chants and Holy Fire; Buzz in my ears; People colorfully dressed, running around; Total chaos and noise; People saying “Aww she looks so beautiful” though I felt that I looked like a stuffed goat with Jewels and flowers; Continuous ‘Cheese’ and ThanQs in the reception for full 3 hours… Sigh!

These are all I remember! The rest of the picture, I got only from the photos!

It all blew so fast, with hardly any time to stand aside and breathe. After a week in Andaman (yeah, nice break, but not planning to elaborate on that :P), here I am in Bangalore, settling down - back to eating eggs, going on facebook and GMail as and when I want, blogging, sitting in a silent office that the Bangalore branch is (dead-silent when compared to the Chennai office, which is much more friendlier, casual and noisier), wearing sober cotton kurtis, watching Dexter and House, driving my pep+ (which was taken away from me in the month before marriage for ‘my safety’), eating corn flakes, sight-adichufying good looking guys in Bangalore (;D)… slowly settling down…

One of Us... One of Them...

It’s been so long since I blogged, actually, since I wrote at all about anything or anyone. After all, life isn’t filled with sunshine and rainbows and butterflies and puppies, now is it?

The weekends seem to have huge ‘to-do’ lists and going out of towns and weddings (yeah.. awfully lot of them these days!! We’ll come to that one later.) and weekdays… umm.. well, what did I do on weekdays? Good grief! I really can’t even remember what I did on weekdays! They seem to have just flown away (nothing too pleasant though, I assure you!).

But amongst everything/nothing going on in the mundane life, one very special occasion that happened last weekend in Salem brought back wide smiles and sound laughter and back-in-the-past feelings.

It was our wingie’s wedding!!The first of us to enter into ‘the holy matrimony’, and all of us (well most of us) gathered in her home town Salem to attend the function and be there and wish her the best of luck.

Well, it all started way back in their psenti-sem, my fourth year, when one night at 1 am, the female called for a mid-night-wing-meeting and ushered us all into her room. Anxiously, we snuggled comfortably on her bed as she sat opposite to n told us about how she, one of us (happy singles) had had become one of them (committed ones), about how this guy from her PS station liked her n proposed to her and how she had taken her time to think about it and finally agreed the day before that night, while we all sat looking at her in total shock, with our mouths wide open. After all, she was the most sadhu-est most rational and level headed person in our wing and here she was, in love (no offence to the other lovers in the world)!! I mean it wasn’t rare to find girls ‘in love’ or going out with guys on campus, just that it was hard to imagine her there!

Far away seems those days when she would lie to us about her sleeping and hide into her room talking with him over phone and think we didn’t know what was going on. But they all came back when there she was, standing in her wedding sari, with all the bridal make up, blushing all over when the photographer asked the bride and the groom to stand in a variety of poses (please don’t imagine anything perverted.. they were cute pics taken all done under both parents’ supervision. :P) while me n data were standing in a side, commenting big time and making them all laugh.

All five years on campus, whenever it came to wing’s decking up session, I was the one who used to tie them all saris, helped them with eye liners and kajals, etc. (yeah.. and I loved it- and as I remember, the decking sessions used to be so much fun!!) Here in the wedding, though a couple of beauticians were onto her, it was really cool to look at, a girl being dressed and attended and pampered like a queen!! Complicate hair-dos, face makeup, kundan stones being stuck on hair to give a classy effect and even designs on hands with sparklers and stones stuck here and there, lots of bangles clattering on her arms, as she stepped out of her room in the Bengali-styled sari, gosh! She looked so pretty!:)


From about a month ago, us wingies had been brain storming about the best gift we could get, and loads of ideas were pooled in, and we finally, after a million email-threads, successfully decided and ordered one. For the wedding, since the gift itself was too huge to carry, we ordered it to be delivered at her home when she went back to Hyd, and gave her a huge greeting card in the reception, with each of us personally signed- with love, from wingies.:)

The Saturday night was in a hotel room with all of us sitting and gossiping away like old times, showing each other the dresses and accessories we had gotten for the wedding, telling each other’s stories, taking snaps.. wow! It was like having fallen into a fantasy pit of the past!

The wedding itself, was pretty simple, about an hour or so full of rituals n relatives gathering around the stage. After the wedding was over, she came and sat with us for some time, and her happiness and her peaceful mind and genuine smile said a lot about how much she had enjoyed every bit of the ceremonies and how much she loved this guy and the extent to which she was looking forward to this new lifestyle as a wife to someone she loved and someone who in turn cared a lot about her.

There have been loads of times when I have thought (actually all of us wingies have had discussions on), about how embarrassing the whole ordeal of bearing with our parents’ look-out-for-a-groom drama and how awkward it was going to be to be introduced in front of strangers, to a stranger, whom they would have supposedly chosen for us to move in with and live with when we didn’t even know if he, in the very least even respected us! I mean- a happy life starts with love, love starts with friendship, which begins with trust and understanding, the very basis of which is mutual respect and acknowledgement of each other’s likes and dislikes, attitudes and ideas, policies and beliefs. With none of these, with complete faith in just a small piece of paper called horoscope, when our (I refer to girls alone here) parents would get us married send us off to a stranger’s place (that too after spending completely for the wedding, as the groom’s side would, in most cases, hardly even open their purse!), it wouldn’t be just embarrassing or awkward, but much more.

Anyway, we were all glad about how our friend found love and trust in the hands of someone with whom she was a good friend first, got to know him well, and then fell in love and after an year of being a ‘girl friend’, got married to him, and escaped the-parents-pressure. For everything, there is a worst case and a best case and loads of cases in between, and hers, I would definitely classify amongst the best case.

On Sunday as we all started off in different directions after the wedding, there were a chain of thoughts haunting my mind, ”Damn! After the really awesome weekend, here I go back to reality, the @%@#$#&^*%^$ world that I live in, and back to office on Monday! Why-o-why does Monday have to come so soon?!? Why-o-why do good times end so fast?!? Oh the nooo… I don’t wanna go home now… I don’t wanna go to the damn office tomorrow, and to think about it, I don’t wanna go anywhere! The only place I wanna go is to the past, and that’s the one place I can’t go! AAAHHHHHH… #$%$&Y^%E$&*%^@$%@!!!!!”