June 29, 2005

Monsoons

Mumbai in the monsoons...heaven!!.....
Unless , that is you have a thing against getting drenched right down to your undies...

Been raining mercilessly for the last 2 days here in Vashi...weather forecast is for 3 more days of rain...

Break out:
The garam samosas & pakodas;
Chilled beer ..plenty of it;
Raincoats, Gumboots & Umbrellas ( windcheaters?..pfhaaah!!!);
hot chai and ciggies (every 20 mins or so);
Big smiles....

Sawai's wedding

Sawai's wedding happened very traditionally in Rajasthan...

June 22, 2005

Sawai Singh Rajpurohit's Wedding.....

Most everyone has seen a Punjabi wedding or a Bengali wedding (atleast in extended 3 hr long technicolor tearjerker/romantic comedies)...but not a Rajasthani wedding, and definitely not a traditional Rajasthani wedding(====>>reasons to follow). Therefore, when rumour was that a certain Mr. Sawai Singh Rajpurohit is going to get wed in aamchi Rajasthan,I for one made up my mind not to miss such a chance. But the first thought in my mind however, was ,"Here's old Savvy up to his evergreen pranks". Nor was I alone, several other Iconoclasts( COEPians miight just recognise us from a wierd ,but loveable, orange T-shirt with a hood..;)..) were more forthright with Sawai and told him pretty pointedly that until we had an actual invite in hand none of us were going to even believe him, coming to his wedding was several stages apres that...Anyways, to cut a long story short, Sawai handed us (Mumbai branch of Iconoclasts) our invites in person, and nebulous plans were fixed, holidays applied for, and the date in the calendar marked for Sawai's wedding...

The shaadi was to happen on the 19th of June( initially , we thought it would be on the 18th ,but with Sawai, such things are not to be grudged...especially if you consider that the wedding was actually at 2:00 a.m. in the morning) and since the venue was the quaint and suitably remote interior village of Kunwarda , we ( Das,Roshan(Dorli),Kunal(K.T),Avinash(Avya),Pintya, Sachin(Kesri) and self) were all set to leave on the 16th by a hired car...So we finally piled into our hired Chevrolet Tavera and headed Rajasthan-ward at about 11:30 p.m. on 16th evening(?)... After a long and memorable drive punctuated by stops at local dhabas for food and booze (except in Modi-land which is DRY..:(..) we finally arrived at Kunwarda on the 17th evening at about 10 p.m...after a quick word with Savvy at his home we shot off to where we were being put up for the night, The Royal Rajwada at Bhadrajun (pretty fancy it was , I might add), a quick wash-up to get rid of 24 hours of continuous driving, and then back to Savvy's for dinner...

[aside]
Now, a traditional Rajasthani wedding proceeds as follows:
First, the prospective In-laws meet the son/daughter-in-law. At this stage,the bride and the groom make do with photographs. Then, they(the parents) consent to the wedding and the time and date. Once fixed the marriage preparations run parallelly and separately at each end , until finally, the Groom and his baaraat party reach the village of the girl, and the actual marriage ceremony with complete pheras and everything is performed. Now, the baaraat party does not include any of the Groom's lady relatives therefore even your Mom and your Sister aren't present at the actual shaadi ceremony (assuming that you are a traditional Rajasthani groom). Not only that even though your Dad accompanies you on the trip to the girl's village, at the time of the marriage even he is not supposed to be present there. Given that Rajasthani weddings usually have their shubh-muhurats late in the night/earrrly in the morning (2:30ish (a.m.) in this case)...and, that we had to rather inconvenience the Bride's parents and hassle them into allowing us to be present at the time of the pheras...also, factoring in that the bride was veiled completely even at the time of the ceremonies(I believe even Savvy only really saw/met his bride after the ceremonies)... you get a flavour of how traditional the wedding was , and how unlikely it is that such events will be part of the next Mira Nair Bollywood tearjerker entitled "Desert wedding".....
[/aside]

Once at Savvy's we were treated to a traditional Rajsthani dance by the lady members of Sawai's family which is all part of the marriage ceremony. We also sampled some staple rajasthani fare esp the "Dal vaati"(?)..which is a ball shaped roti like fare rather reminiscent of the Bihari "littha". At the end of which, someone insisted that we shake our leg to the music as well and, well, we did!!...

Ceremony over, we tootled back to the Royal Rajwada to spend the night. But my description of my trip would be sorely disappointing if I did'nt spend some time describing the fascinating history, the amazing beauty and the colourful characters we met at the Rajwada...


The rest of the story...

June 14, 2005

BOOK TAG

Total Number of Books I Own:
Plenty. Atleast close to a hundred books strewn casually about my flat, and growing at the rate of approx. 3-4 books a week.


Last (3) Book(s) I Read:....
Since I tend to read 3-4 books parallelly.....they would be... Celebrating Silence (excerpts from the weekly messages of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar), Global Dominion or Global leadership by..let me get this right... Zbiegniew Brzezezinski, and The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra (rereading this one)

Five Authors who Mean a Lot to Me:
Since its hardly likely that I can pick just 5 books as my faves , I'll go with 5 of my fave authors. These would include(among others who would however count as lesser equals):
Isaac Asimov, R.K.Narayan,P.G.Wodehouse, Nirad C.Chaudhuri, Swami Vivekananda

Tag five people and have them do this on their blogs:
Since this blog-meme has been going round for a while, I'd like to tag these people who (hopefully) haven't been book-tagged yet,and whose reading habits should be really interesting:

Maniche

Prabhu

Rahul

Vinayak

Sumedha

June 09, 2005

One Point Fivesome

A blog in five parts:

1.1--- Ram Gopal Verma rocks as a director. I've enjoyed all his movies and respect his quest to break out of the "same old, same old" grind. However, even RGV has sort of got stuck into two genres viz. the Supernatural and the Underworld. Nothing against that, in fact I saw his latest offering, "D", yesterday...one thing about RGV's movies that always seems to stand out is that a completely fascinating first half is sacrificed at the altar of an extremely pedestrian second half resulting in a movie that is on the whole, at best,above average(there are exceptions like Sathya which keep the plot tight till the end, but then they are just that:exceptions)...but with "D" Ramu has scored a winner...the movie is short, but the story is crisp from beginning to the very end.If you haven't seen "D" yet, do....it's worth a dekho!!

1.2--- Still on movies, it seems to me that the truly great movies make it there not on the strength of merely good story lines, crisp dialogues or exceptional performances but also good editing.Expertly wielded scissors can make an ordinary story come alive. Sadly, with people like Karan Johar around ,bollywood has a Loooooong way to go....

1.3--- Read THIS post on Gaurav's blog, and was reminded of an earlier post of mine

1.4--- I feel a gentle glow as understanding dawns and I am enveloped by a strange aura of peace, within me is voiced a revelation which I gladly share with you: "Swimming has to be the single most relaxing thing to do in the world"

1.5--- My next blog will a BOOK TAG blog..so bear with me..