Life – The Vidyarthi

The Big Fat Marathi Wedding

March 14, 2014March 14, 2014 kv6 Comments

Chance presents itself!

I have attended quite a many weddings since I gained cognition, but all of them have been those of our own culture or at least in our own state. It was my hearty wish for a very long time to attend a wedding of one of the other cultures of the kaleidoscopic India. So, when my friend (a “He”) invited me (although he didn’t expect me to come!!) to attend his wedding in Satara,Maharashtra, I jumped at the chance!

The Dancing Horse!

I became a bit apprehensive when the groom told me that we would be staying in his village (Shivajinagar) which was quite obvious on my part as all my previous experience of villages haven’t been real good. Upon reaching the village around midnight, with all the apprehensions and imaginations in our heads, we simply weren’t prepared for the spectacle that greeted us. The scene was simply hilarious. The groom was riding a dancing horse! and surely it danced a lot better than the intoxicated men gyrating all around him. Oh and one more thing was new : live singer in a specialised band-bus (Sadly I forgot to click a pic of the bus!)

The Village!

Now let me describe the village in detail . It was a village in true sense but lacked nothing in terms of urban facilities; be it good sanitation or electricity or running water supply or a Tata Sky connection, the place had it all. But, the beauty of the place was rugged yet breathtaking with so much of open space available that you won’t know what to do with it!! And yes the air, the breeze, the cool and clean and refreshing breeze that blew almost all through the day, was perhaps the single most awesome thing that I’ll remember about the place.

All said and done, a place is only as good as the people of the place and make no mistake the people were awesome too. No one understood a word of Hindi (except the Groom’s immediate family) and we didn’t understand a word of Marathi, but we seldom faced any difficulty in getting our thoughts across or understanding the point the villagers were making(Yes it was very very very tough). My friend’s immediate family (i.e. his father, mother and sister hereafter called uncle, aunty and sis respectively) were understandably very busy but didn’t ever let us feel out of home.

The Big Fat Marathi Wedding

Well this was what I went to witness. And literally we were the only people who witnessed the whole wedding!! Jokes apart, it was a wedding quite different from those that I have seen as yet but the essence was the same. Yes, the little nitty-gritties were different, e.g. the bride and groom attended the rasma of Halad Chadavane together unlike the individual haldis in Bihari weddings etc. The Akshataropan rasma was again a spectacle. More than 1000 people were gathered in the hall to bless the couple with akshata (sacred rice). The rasma lasted for only 15 minutes and when the final mantras were chanted and the final grains of akshata were sprinkled as blessings, suddenly there was a huge commotion. Within 5 minutes the hall was empty and only 15-20 people remained. People were in such a rush to get out that they literally jammed the doorway. It was hilarious and we couldn’t stop laughing! Finally, the sacred fire was kindled and the seven vows were taken, the seven circumambulations of the sacred fire were completed, and the bride and the groom were declared Man and wife in the eyes of God and society!

The Vidai was pretty much the same: full of tears and laughter, fear mingled with hope and grief mixed with joy! Then began the tour of Temples and courtesy visits to the homes of our numerous Gods. Wherever we went, we were welcomed in the same spirit as the bride and the groom, which raised my respect and love for the local people many notches higher. Finally, Goddess Lakshmi (read the Bride) entered the house to make it a home for the groom! The entire setup was so beautifully managed and done that it seemed almost flawless and no one was complaining; this in itself is no mean achievement when it comes to Indian weddings!

The Hilarious Bathing Ceremony

We were scheduled to leave early morning the next day of the wedding but aunty would hear nothing of it and ordered us to stay at least until lunch so that we could witness the bathing ceremony of the bride and the groom (we didn’t feel like going anyway). The halad utaravane ceremony was, as I’ve already mentioned, hilarious. All the ladies of the village were gathered and amongst a lot of chatter, jokes and singsong competitions, the ceremony was concluded in all pomp. The ladies played wet holi (minus the colours of-course) and even I got to drench my friend in water; there’s nothing sweeter than to increase the embarrassment of an already embarrassed friend!! This was followed by another tour of temples of the village and those of the adjoining villages. The thing that I loved the most about these temples was their location. Each of them : Amazing!!

All in all it was an awesome treat, the wedding. If I hadn’t gone (like all my other friends) I would have missed an opportunity of a life-time. God bless the Bride and the Groom and may they have a wonderful and blissful married life!

I thought Hell was supposed to be Scorching!

October 23, 2011 kv1 Comment

Since the last 6 months or so am living in a place called Korba in Chhattisgrah, India also known as the Power capital of the country and appropriately so. I mean there’s a clearing in between the numerous power plants from where you can count 19 chimneys if you go for a 360 degree view. Yeah we don’t lack in electricity but we sure do have a huge Oxygen deficit out here causing people here to feel stuffy and tired all the time. And then there is ASH!

Ash is all this post is about. We at Korba have been facing an Ash crisis since last few months details of which I can’t go into but just understand that the situation is like ‘you are eating too much while the toilet is already overflowing!’ Got it na? Anyways in this regard only Iwas alotted 2 shifts at the Ash Silo and man isn’t that place a living hell ( while I was driving for my shifts I literally listened to Highway to Hell by ACDC!!)

When you start getting near the silo area all you can see all around you is white powdery substance (which you may or may not confuse with snow at first sight! I did BTW! :-P) And then when you finally get you are greeted by a landmass that really looks like an island of snow or an iceberg or a glacier or a white sand beach or whatever…you must have got the picture (Again if you haven’t, can’t help you out as pictures aren’t allowed I think!). Its when I finally settled down there for my shift that I began to realise how much more stuffy the air in that place was ( I am comparing with the Plant ofcourse!) and then the 8 hours seemed like Dilli Door Hai!

The night shift was even better(Sarcastic!). The ash, I was told absorbs lots of moisture leading to lowering down of the temperature of the area as a whole and thus comes the heading of the post : I thought Hell was supposed to be scorching! It seems that whenever we humans try to enact God, we do screw up bigtime. I mean the hell that we created was Freezing man, comeon! Anyways am glad that the tryst is now finally over, so Homewards Ahoy!

Korba Diaries!

July 31, 2011 kvLeave a comment

Korba, Chhattisgarh!

Thats the place which I call home now. Naah home will always be Ranchi however crowded or conjusted or painful the capital of Jharkhand may be, it will be the only place that I will ever call my home.

Coming back, yeah Korba. So, being true to its name Korba greeted me with Cobras within the first week itself and it was like great to see the cobras frolicking in the wild! (obviously I am kidding…it chilled my spine!!). And the city’s air is like the most pure I have ever experienced (SARCASTIC!); I mean the first storm of Korba left the visibility to a big fat zero…yeah it was like standing in a pure white chamber, a chamber made up of pure white ASH! Yeah the ash that our company the several others like ours cough up all the time. With the ESPs being turned off to cut down on APC the situation is hellish sometimes. I have always wanted to see white snow covering the ground. Here the ground sure is white, but its snow at all, and sure does not become water upon melting!

The plant’s quite good though. But it seems that we do carry ill luck around. As soon as we came, firecrackers went up in the plant with Transformers bursting one after another. And you know what was the best thing, I got posted in the Transformers Group right when the group was going through its most troublesome period ever! Yeah I got loads to learn, but what the hell man. I couldnt even go to the wildlife park that my friends went to 😦 (Although the park did close as soon as they went there as the monsoon came knocking HEHEHEHEHE).

Negativities aside, the place is quite good in itself. Although I wont recommend any tourists here, people who want to see industries sure should come here. I mean there are 5-6 power plants, an Aluminium plant and many more industries still coming up. Its not the 5th most polluted Indian city for nothing!! Anyways I am liking it here at the moment. For being just a stop in the journey this place is quite good, but to make it a permanent residence…Nopes never. Lets see what the future holds.

The diary sure will continue!

There and Back again…(and some more!)

October 20, 2010October 20, 2010 kv3 Comments

Hmm…yeah its been again quite a long time since I wrote..and for a good reason. Loads have happened in the past 2 and a half months and mostly it has been good for me. When I last wrote I was on my way to join Sesa Goa, now I am an employee of NTPC and am presently at Kahalgaon, Bihar. Yeah it was a hell of a journey!

But the journey that enraptured me with emotions(all the wrong kinds of them) was the one that I made yesterday : to Bhagalpur! What started off as a trip to the (in)famous city turned out to be quite a treat for all the people who love BADDD journeys! We were six people off into the blue. Our errands were different but destination the same. It was the first time that I travelled for more than a hour in an auto-rickshaw and man it was like hell. The roads initially were like you could find some amount of metaled road in a group of several potholes, but steadily the conditions became better to the extent that now all we could see on the roads were herds of buffaloes! Well I’ve to say one thing it was the very first time that I saw trained buffaloes…I mean they were all moving in a line behind their masters..an extraordinary feat really!

Then came the famous Bhagalpur Engineering College (BEC) from where one of my housemates, Shashikant (better known as Konchi @ Danda!!) has completed his Engineering. It was great to see an institution that churns out the electrical and mechanical engineers plunged in darkness…afterall people do good things only when they are forced by the circumstances, in this case the darkness or perhaps there is a rule there to go to bed by 6.30 in the evening (that explains Danda’s habits!)

Jokes apart, I was really saddened by the rampant unemployment and hence the immense poverty that’s spread all through Bihar. I could see beautiful farmlands for stretches as far as my naked eyes could see, and yet the very farmer who is toiling day and night to make the farm the way it is, lives in stark poverty as the money made out of the crops doesn’t manage to trickle down to them. Moreover each family was having a bunch of kids, all half-naked, roaming around in the streets, some helping their fathers in herding the cattle while some just loitering away: In short no signs of schools. Whatever the politicians might be saying, this is the ground reality of Bihar. Yes the situation has tremendously improved from what I had earlier seen in the rule of Lalu Prasad Yadav and the criminals that were the MLA’s back then but still loads of works remains to be done. At this juncture it is quite laughable that LPY is tempting the Bihar public with the offer of a motorbike for every Bihari…what the hell…when will these people learn? All I can hope is that the Bihari junta has come to its senses, risen out of the rampant caste prejudices and will vote the correct people onto power and not the one’s who go promising Bikes to people..

Go(A)ing away…

July 29, 2010July 29, 2010 kvLeave a comment

I am sitting in front of my computer, with my favourite word processor flashing its pale blue light on my face, thinking what to write today. Nothing special is going on around here to write about…

Yeah rail accidents are occurring: so what they have become now a very normal occurrence with one big accident happening every month. Yeah there have some more disgraceful antics of the politicians to garner mileage from the accidents: so what, it’s what they do the best.

Yeah, the Indian cricket team has lost the 1^st test match to the Sri Lankans like no other world number one team is expected to lose: so what, with the Indian cricket team you get what you least expect every single time.

But yes, there is one thing that’s going to happen after a long long time! I am going to away from the computer screen for quite a long time now that I am going for my job and am not taking my dear computer with me. So it’s going to be a pretty long break, I guess from the world of blogging, starting the 1^st of August (although it was already so a few weeks ago!)…the question is will I be able to survive without it?? Let’s see, because that’s one of the most difficult things: to be away from the computer after being hooked to it, virtually 24X7 for the past 4 years! It’s going to be interesting seeing all the extra time that I will be getting and all the things that I can do with that extra bit of time!

Let’s see!

I have a dream

July 21, 2010July 21, 2010 kv4 Comments

College life has ended. I am on the verge of entering into a completely new life, a life quite different from what I am used to as of now. A dream from a distant past has been fulfilled : I have become a professional, a working one! But today I realised that there’s no end of dreams;big or small; important or trifling dreams are a constant phenomenon.

Well yes friends, not for the first time in my life, today I say it again : I have a dream. This dream has somehow forced me to think…think about so many things; think about what have I achieved in my life? How have I helped my country? How have I rendered my services to the society? So many questions, but the answer to all of them was a big fat NOTHING. Till now, I have had nothing that I can be proud of truly.

This dream has forced me to think…what next? Is this it? Or is something still remaining? Kya Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost…or has the movie ended and the time has come for the credits to show themselves up? Well I don’t think that its over, I don’t think that the time for giving the credits has come yet…I think its still the formative stage, the dramatic climax is still to come….so keep watching because yes my friends, I have a dream!

If Only…

July 18, 2010July 19, 2010 kvLeave a comment

Things change so dramatically, sometimes in a blink of an eye, sometimes before even you could think a thing. Today its exactly a year hence and some change or another had to be there, but a change of this nature and this proportion was something that I never expected nor a thing that I ever imagined. And today, I feel so strange, so very strange.

Every year on the 18th of July, right from 2006 we went for a franctic search for a suitable gift for Chotu as his birthday would be at the brink…looked for it at so many places, so many shops, and then finally settled every time for a box of Ferrero Rocher and a book or a game CD (pirated of course!!). But it’s not the case today. This time there’s no box of Rocher, no book, no CD, no expectations of a great card, nothing at all. One single incident took away so many things from so many lives…God! Sometimes it feels like blasphemy even to think that it was the work of the almighty, ever kind, the Lord God of ours.

If things weren’t like what they are at present, i.e. if everything were normal i.e only if he had worn a helmet that day or perhaps crossed that place one minute earlier or later, he still wouldn’t have accompanied me to one of those annual frantic gift searches as he would have been basking in the summer of California at Google, but there would have been a satisfaction and conviction that he would call from halfway round the globe just to wish Chotu a Very Happy Birthday…That conviction is what I miss the most and so does Chotu and everyone else who knew you…

Promises and Beliefs…

October 24, 2009October 24, 2009 kv4 Comments

Yet again quite a long time since my last post…cant help it! 😦 But I have some promises to keep (yeah so do you!) and some very important things to believe (yeah yeah you too!)…So things will keep coming and I will keep blogging. However intermittent, however irregular the posts may be, they will come, and that I can promise.

Promises and beliefs…why did I choose such a topic?? Even I don’t know a thing about it…but since it came and threatened to blow my head off with the accompanying throbbing, I decided to give it a jot.

Promises

“Promises are made to be broken“, yeah a trite saying that features only in the B-grade Hindi movies these days. Believe me this has become something archaic. These days people are making promises while totally meaning to keep them with all their hearts. If it weren’t so, would we still have been getting the water and electricity and the food that our politicians promise us while begging for votes? They keep their promises…believe it or not they do…even if the urgency to fulfill them comes to their minds only when the next polls start knocking the doors. The frantic pace with which the roads are built, the electrifications are done and the other promises are fulfilled, all by the MLA funds and MP funds when the polls approach simply fill us citizens with hope and awe. ” Ahh!! Minister Babu is doing work…see how much he cares about us…” It is really great to see how punctual our great politicians are…poll time comes and they are like omnipresent too…with garlanded visages on every nook and cranny of the street, requesting our votes. No no, don;t worry Minister babu isn’t asking for our precious votes for free; in return he has many new promises (and some of the old ones that he couldn’t keep). Cast your vote in his favor and see those promises come true when the next polls come!

Beliefs

Now talking about beliefs…they are the most complex and abstract of all the human emotions that God has made for our use…believe me!! Even the English dictionary confirms the importance of this absurdly absurd emotion. There are more than 100 words in the English dictionary that are related to belief only. Some mean lack of it while some mean the abundance of it. Some are severe quarrels due to them while some are peaceful marriages because of them. If we concentrate on just 1 hour of our lives…we will see how much we believe. We believe in our army for our safety, we believe in others for most of the work in the world, we believe in God and feel blessed, we believe in our parents for all nit-bits in our lives, we believe in our spouse, we believe our friends, we believe our sports persons (most of all Sachin), we believe in luck…most of all we believe in ourselves.

SO…

All I can say is keep on believing and keep on fulfilling your promises, because whatsoever you do in your life comes back to you, in the same form or an altered one, but in the end it comes back. So do good if you want to see good thing happen to you. Keep your promises to see the promises others make to you get fulfilled. Keep on believing people and yourslef, if you want them to believe you…because thats what life’s all about!

50 is a big number…

September 19, 2009 kv2 Comments

Papa turned 50 today…and you know what 50 is a big big number.

I mean 5 decades – 50 years, that’s roughly around 18250 days…God that’s huge. But more than the years or days its the amount of love and respect that he has earned in the past years that matters…wherever he has gone in his tenure as the Jail Superintendent he has earned a lot of both…

He is my idol, the exact thing that I want to be…not that I wanna be the prison superintendent exactly, but that I wanna be like him. I want to have love for people like him, I want to have admiration for elders like he does, I want to be the bridge between people that he has been throughout his life. I want to be the boat that he has been in helping people cross the river of troubles quite so often.

When I will be 50, I will really be proud of myself if can be anything that can be compared to my papa!

Papa you ROCK!!! 🙂

Man/Machine??

September 17, 2009September 17, 2009 kv7 Comments

Sorry for being so so so very late in posting something new here…loads were happening…so..

Anyways, why suddenly this topic??

Its that a friend and I were having quite a discussion tonight – about what man was supposed to be and what man has become. about what god intended us to be and we in the end made out of ourselves. We discussed about a lot of things, about sentiments and emotions, about relationships, about success, about winning and losing. And yet we couldn’t come to any particular solution or agreement.

We share the common view on the modern people who include me and him of course. Today, people have mostly been turned into ones who only care about winning, in any possible manner, by any possible kind of approach. They don’t think twice before asking for favors and then moving on once they get them. I mean, once the purpose from a particular person is achieved move on and never look back. All they care is about winning. Loss is something that has become exceedingly invisible from the dictionary of the modern man. Its all about working at maximum efficiency with minimum losses and minimum input. And you know what, this is what being practical has come to mean.

God created us to live our lives fully, to enjoy it to the fullest extent. But I think this enjoyment can’t ever come if we stop thinking about others. If we don’t lose a single time what is the pleasure of winning then? If someone doesn’t lose ,how will he ever experience the ecstasy of victory?

I, by nature tend to think a lot about the things that affect me in general and the world in particular. Whenever there is a single instance of mass killing, my heart bleeds out. Whenever someone around me is sad I become restless until his/her agony subsides. Why? I really don’t know. It may be due to my impractical nature…maybe. But if being practical means not even thinking twice before walking over a corpse just in order to gain the advantage in life, its well and superfine that I am impractical.

The modern man has become more of a machine, always thinking about winning while the way in which it happens is inconsequential to them. But in today’s world if you have to succeed in the conventional sense then there’s no other way than to be practical . Well for me I can’t be ever this , I am human and can’t think like the robots and machines ever in my life. I would like to be a loser of a human than a winner of a machine anytime of the day.