The Wordsmith

With the family having a veritable baby boom in the year 2000 suddenly the house is filled with a lot of 10 year old children, boys in particular who have arrived from different parts of the world to finally get inducted into brahmin hood by having the upanayanam (sacred thread ceremony). While I believe in things like upanayanams and brahmin hood and sacred thread as much as I believe that India will one day win the FIFA world cup the elderly folks in the house think that unless a thread is worn around a young boy's neck and unless lots of money is spent on feeding already well fed priests the boy will be impure and will be *GASP* considered a non-brahmin. Oh the horror!

Anyway I digress. The one good thing of having inane functions which have about as much significance as Aishwarya rai does in Hollywood is that it helps the family gather and meet and a chance for me to meet cousins after a really long time. It is fun to have cousins over, especially when you are meeting them after a long time and MORE especially (can u say more especially?) when they come to the same house in which you grew up and spent a major part of your childhood summer vacations in. Showing them the secret passageways to the house so they can quiety sneak outside the house and go play after 6 in the evening, the place where paati hides the murukku and home made chocolates and how you can reach it by precariously balancing a stool on a top of a chair. I also taught them how to play a lot of cool games like dark room, earth-water-air etc.

Dark room is a game where you make a fairly big room pitch dark and play hide and seek inside the room. not blind man buff mind you.it used to be one of my favorite games when I was a kid coz at the end of the game there would be at least 5 scraped knees, 1 broken teeth, 2 crying children, a few clumps of hair in each child's hand and some fantastic memories. Similarly it is my modest boast that earth-water-air was a game which i devised when i was a kid. basically there would be one person who would get to shout earth, air or water and the rest would have to move within 5 seconds to earth (the floor), water (any elevated surface like a bed or a chair) or air (suspend themselves in mid air). This usually resulted in the breakage of a lot of rather flimsy furniture and generally put us in the bad books of the adults. Actually till date I don't remember being in the good books of any of the adults in my family. The last time I got even remotely close was when I went to the shop and bought milk for paati, only to be cheated by the shopkeeper who sold 2 days old milk and which resulted in a lot of adults competing with each other to occupy the bathroom the next day.

Though my process of imparting this knowledge to the next generation was frowned upon by the adults, personally i feel that what is childhood if u havent endured a few spankings, broken some furniture and been in disgrace 70% of the times. Though I find it rather disconcerting that kids nowadays do not want to be naughty. This is about as shocking a discovery for me as finding out George Clooney is gay. To say that I would be shocked would be such a gross understatement.So my cousins consider playing on the PSP, watching cartoon network and surfing the internet more fun and interesting than *GASP* my sister and me. Agreed that the sibling is not very interesting but ME??? I am the fun-nest person I know (and nobody else knows! :P). So i got quite a shock when my cousins in their american accent went "You are B-O-R-I-N-G man."

Though it broke my heart when they said that, I had to accept the fact that I had no clue how to operate a PSP (and had no interest in learning), i couldnt recognize a single cartoon that they watched on TV. I don't even remember when i stopped reading Nancy Drews and Sweet Valley High (Shan't mention archies and enid blyton. I still read them voraciously). I am O-L-D. At my age my mother had two kids, my grandmother had 3 and my great grandmother had 4. I am constantly reminded of this fact by my mom when I say I don't want to get married. According to her, women lose their reproductive capacities by 27 and become menopausal after that. My grandmother thinks I have child bearing hips and should get married and have children. The child bearing hips part by the way isnt a compliment. It means you are so round around your waist that it is almost possible that you could be carrying a child.

Man, I ramble a lot. Coming back to what this entire post was all about..Hmmm. So what was the entire post all about? Ah yes. The cousins are here, the relatives are here, loads of family functions are here and the pressure to be married is here again and has reared it ugly head. When you are as old as I am the references to the M word stop being subtle. No longer am I asked "So what plans now" but unknown people directly ask me, "So when is the wedding?" or "When will I get my next kalyana saapadu" (A rather greedy person this. If i married every time my relatives wanted to be fed I would have had to be severely polygamous). One elderly relative even came to me said "See that boy over there? You like him? You can marry him". Oh thank you magnanimous aged relative. You sure are kind. :-\. Of course there is the odd "progressive" relative who comes and says, "Punjabi, Muslim, Malayali, Bengali a mattum kalyanam pannikadhe. Brahmanan a paathuko. Iyengar kuda parvailla". I have learnt the art of evading such questions by acting so busy at family functions that what relatives see, is not me but a blur of green, blue or whatever it is that I am wearing. Faster movements will ensure that the relative does not even recognize your gender and will concentrate on attacking the grape juice in hand.

With that wise piece of advice I shall now leave you and attend to trivial things like work, boss and the likes.