The end of an era

Have not written anything in ages. We visited India to do the Varushabdhegam ceremony for my dad. A year has flown by since his passing and I had promised him over and over again that I will be there to do his rites. Planned this trip in Jan as soon as the calendar was available and dates were known.

This trip has been very challenging on every front. Physically exhausting as the best tickets were on Emirates in Jan and we had an unnecessary war to make flying through middle east miserable.

Mentally and emotionally I was oscillating between being numb to being in tears. My father saved everything. Every photo, inland letter from my college day, Aerograms from my grad school days, old photos, prizes I got, gifts, the first suitcase I took to IT-BHU, there was enough material in the attic to start a Sundar museum. Not to mention he had similar stuff for my brother and sister. Cleaning up everything and going through stuff was emotional.

Then there was a promise to go do a Pitr tharpanam in the himalayas (He did it in the late nineties) and I had no idea what to expect. Went and did it anyways. Two weeks of extreme stress, a few smiles from nostalgia here and there, some sighs of relief of things going as planned and a sense of completion and accomplishment that somehow we have done everything we possibly can for the dude to go into the afterlife.

If after all this his soul doesn’t rest in peace, when my time comes I will take a lot of people to task.

May take a lot of time to write about this trip in more detail. Given my emotional state, this will be a raw post. So after this will switch to another recent trip that never saw a mention.

Have spent three hours non stop looking at old photos and videos this evening. Had no idea 3 hours flew by. A rush of memories.. so randomly saved a few of the videos to my desktop and made the compilation at the end of this post..

My dad had a crappy childhood but he lucked out with my mom. So his life got better and better till Parkinson’s got him. I have inherited a lot of good things from him (hopefully not Parkinson’s). Going through the photos made me realize a lot of things all at once.

Still coming to terms with the fact that our vaadhyaar gave me a bunch of darbai and pavithrams and said “you are now set for a year of tharpanams”. My mom is living with my brother and finally she has seen the inside of a temple after a year of staying home. The familiar place where I would go see my dad or sing and have him nod his head or raise his eyebrows in silent appreciation is also moving on. I did get to sing a song for him one last time at the end of the ceremony. A vallalar song. He used to keep telling this story of how when I was almost 2 (before my brother was born) I would wear a towel around my head and hide behind a door. He would have to find me when coming back home from office and I would announce myself as “I am Ramalinga Adigal”. . . he would imitate me saying that as a baby. He never got tired of that story. So it was apt to sing it there.

My mom is a rock. She is probably dealing with this a lot better than any of us are. The good news is so is my wife. In some twist of fate, I have found an emotionally stoic woman like my mom who takes everything in her stride. Even for that I have to credit my dad.

I can ramble on for another four hours. So will stop here.. My mom told me not to junk anything in that house. So I took photos of 3700 photos and then cut them all up and tossed them. A bitter realization in the exercise is that once we are gone, the physical stuff we collect has to be a small curated shoe box. A few defining things. That is about it. I have 2000 books at home. Magnet boards with magnets from every place we visited, a ton of cassettes, CD’s DVD’s etc.. Not sure if anyone is ever going to look at anything.. so going to start a clean up exercise and change some habits going forward. It will be tough as it is not in my DNA. Time will tell..

My dad holding Jr. after her Mottai in 2003

A photo with my mom before we started doing the tharpanam two weeks ago..

As a child I have played cricket with this tree, climbed on the parapet walls here.. done paper kappals when the road would flood in rainy season.. it was bitter sweet walking with a lot of stuff my dad had saved, in that first suitcase he bought me for my undergrad in Varanasi.

This window view was all he had for most of the last 6 years of his life. The crows were his entertainment as he would watch the sunrise and sunset. Took this photo of a sunrise from that window..

This was the last photo I took of him when he came back from Apollo ICU in September 2024. He knew I would never see him again. Just a small wave of goodbye. He was cremated before I went and did the last rites. Living aboard has as many disadvantages as there are advantages.

We are moving on.. hopefully he is in a much better place now.

the video..

Adding this video of the Vallalar song here. Sang this a day after writing this post. Family who could not make it can listen to it. I was so emotional that afternoon that my attempt must have been a lot more flawed.

We did go do the Char dham and I did a Pitr Tarpanam in Gangothri on Ganga dushera for my dad and all ancestors. I am no Bhageeratha, but I am what my dad got. So he has to make do with my attempt.

It will be some time before I write about that. Mostly painful memories. My sincere request to folks is that this pilgrimage is not to be attempted unless you have 8 -9 days of travel time. Trying to do it in 5-6 days will be extremely painful. Also if you have any health issues or are traveling with older people, this trip is not for you!

Happy to be back home and hug the kids. Folks at work who are culturally insensitive kept asking me how my “vacation went’ inspite of me telling them this is more of an extended bereavement. Good thing I didn’t go postal.

Also don’t know why Baudhayana had to make every thing more complex for his followers. Some day if I get to meet him in spirit, my first question would be “why this kolaveri?”. The Apastambha guys seem to have it easy.

Happy to be writing in this space again.. hopefully will cheer up from tomorrow. I have a good feeling about tomorrow.

Passing the right torches

It was thirty years ago when my parents decided that their two boys should go through the "Upanayanam" ceremony. For those western folks reading this in the US, it is like a "bar-mitzvah" for Hindu brahmin boys. A ceremony which involves getting a thread around their shoulders, that symbolizes their commitment to higher learning. 

Said "higher learning" involved the following :

1. Sitting in front of a fire for hours and offering things into it and getting used to the heat

2. Learning the "Gayathri Mantra" which was to be used as a repetitive prayer

3. Learning to do "Sandhya vandanam" , a prayer done three times a day where we take water and throw it back in water and say different prayers as part of the 15-30 minute routine. 

4. Learn to get blessings from elders the formal way by mentioning our "lineage" and understanding what that means

5. Understanding the relationship between doing certain rituals and its correlation to getting really yummy food in a Pavlovian way

6. Understanding that you are not a kid anymore and people look up to you all of a sudden to be more responsible because you understand 1 through 5! 

7. Joining your grandfather or father in an evening prayer and making them proud without understanding what all the big fuss was about

8. Figuring out that the memory you have inherited comes in very handy when it comes to impressing your elders

9. This is something I forgot on the original list. The "Pranayaama" that was taught as part of Sandhyavandhanam. We were taught how to take in a breath with one nostril, hold it and release it through the other. On any given day we did this around 50 times. 

There may have been many more but the one thing that I deliberately did not list was doing the "Sooryanamaskaaram" which is the Sun Salutation. After the main ceremony finished and just before we went of to lunch, after sitting in front of a fire for 3 hours, the priest took the two newly "poonal"ed kids to see the sun. He asked us to cross our fingers in a grid and look through the sun and said "as part of your daily Sandhyavandhanam, you kids look at the sun for a few second every day like this! This is the soorya namaskaaram". 

Years and years later, I learned that the Sun Salutation in reality involved a series of forward and back bends which are combination of the Half Moon pose and Triangle pose in Hatha Yoga. It is not fair for me to criticize my parents, grandparents or the priest, who had not seen his own bellybutton directly, crossed fingers or not , over god knows how many moons. There was no way that dude was teaching me the real Sun Salutation. 

Somewhere down the line, a ritual in a village setting that would have taught young kids to stand waist deep in water and do forward and back bends, lunges etc. with the spirit of teaching them "as water goes to water" so do you back to this earth, "here, sit and meditate and find some inner peace and while you are at it", and strengthen your body while doing all this changed to fit a context and lost a lot in the translation . I am guessing the running water must have done wonders for one's circulation and bowel movement. 

My parents spent a lot of their savings on this very important ceremony. It was done like a wedding and the feast that followed made my brother and me feel like rock stars.

I still change my thread every year and commit to learning. Maybe just like the ceremony evolved from teaching lifes lessons to fit a modern day context and lost something in the evolutionary process, my commitment also changed.

I commit to watching at least one TED talk a week, reading one book or magazine a week and meditating for at least 10 minutes a day. In a way keeping up with my field of study and sticking to "Materials Science" after most of my classmates have found success in finance or software is my self delusional way of dedication to the "sacred thread".

The Pranayaama must have helped me for sure as I kept up with it for a good 10 years after the Poonal. Somehow I stopped doing it a year after coming to the US. Still don't know why. 

Here is one of the few photos I happen to have from that ceremony where my friend and his dad are congratulating me and my dad shortly after the thing was over. 

These days I am not religious. I think of myself as more of a spiritual person who believes in the goodness in all people. I am also trying to look inward in trying to find goodness in myself first before expecting goodness from ohters. Guess it is yet another change that the years and experiences bring to a person. Or maybe it is all the yoga on a daily basis that tries to work overtime outside the yoga room and search for context in everything. 

This ceremony happens to be only for boys and we see the other kids in my family go through this ritual over time. I still remember one of my cousins pleading with my uncle and aunt to skip the ceremony, have a quiet thing in the house without all the expense and give the saved money to go towards a motorbike he really wanted. He was way ahead of his time. I was not old enough to support him in his noble and thoughtful quest. 

These days the best I can do is to make sure the kids who are getting the "poonal" learn to do the Sun Salutation the right way, be it through the priest or some other person in the audience who knows how to do it. 

Always used to wonder what kind of rite of passage do I give to my two little darlings.  If I can teach them how to improve their physical and mental well being, what could we possibly teach them? This question had a big gaping hole for an answer till Bikram Yoga became a part of my life three years ago. Now there is no doubt in my mind on what I would like to hand over as a "torch" of sorts.

If we can get the kids to do yoga regularly and meditate regularly, they would be far better off than we are. To that end, Jr. is now coming with me to Bikram Yoga once a week. Granted it is not daily, but the fact that she kept this once a week commitment with some reluctance is still a big deal. 

Today the room was a 110 F and she pretty much sat down most of the class, but she stayed in the room. So many people came out and said "You make your dad very proud for hanging in there and trying". Guess she was beaming with a smile, the same way when her young daddy was being congratulated for throwing things in front of a hot fire for 3 hours straight, after managing to repeat a bunch of things in Sanskrit with a perfect pronunciation and a complete lack of understanding. 

Bikram yoga to Jr. may be the same thing as the Sandhya vandhanam was to daddy, but somehow deep down I feel that she is going to be a lot better off then me, in thirty years if she sticks to this routine. She does get to do 20 minutes of Pranayaama as part of the routine in class and this method will help her improve her lung capacity. 

It will be the little one's turn in three years!

When a man gives a woman

This post started as a comment in Dipali's blog. It got too long and became a post here instead!

Fathers are told that the greatest deed a man gets to perform in his lifetime is to give his daughters hand in marriage. The part of the marriage ceremony where the girls father gives away the bride is called Kanya-dhan. Kanya means "virgin" and dhan means "giving" in Sanskrit. The idea of Kanya-dhan being taken literally to be girl-gifting sounds crude, and if taken in todays world, is crude!

Jambu Sastrigal, the man who performed our wedding ceremony explained the significance of Kanyadanam to my FIL during the ceremony..(I was an irritating groom who asked Why? What? for everything). He patiently explained almost every ritual that we performed. Between him and my own grandpa, they had all those rituals covered and most of them pertained to a south Indian marriage where the groom was in his early teens, the girl was still not a teenager (not a woman yet), the whole wedding set in a village setting, arranged marriage, more involvement from parents than the bride and groom, etc. etc.

The priest went on to explain "When you give anything away, you are doing Punyam (more along the lines of "if you love somebody, set them free") and there is no greater punyam than getting your daughter married!" In any case, made my FIL and my father feel elated at the prospect of doing such a great deed!

In todays context though, half the rituals do not make sense because it does not fit todays world. The whole Jaanvasam thing where the groom goes around on a horse or in a "convertible Car" all around the village was to show his face to the local crowd to see if he was already married to anyone! Something along the lines of "if there is anyone who has a problem with this marriage speak up, or forever hold your peace!" in Christian weddings. Today guys go in closed cars around a few blocks in some strange city! Local detective agencies and Google have eventually replaced the car ride today!

If you look at things in the same context, Kanyadhan itself may not mean much to youth. It might still mean something to the parents!

There is something to be said for the marriage ceremony though. The fact that you promise to take care of the person (till death do us apart, in sickness and in health , etc. etc. whatever be the words, whatever be the language .. a living one like English or an arcane one like Sanskrit), the nature of the commitment is somehow put in context when all those people sprinkle rice and flowers on you and bless you as you "get married".

To put it in a geeky nerdy way, it was almost as though a wormhole opened and somehow some deep connections were made in my brain that would take that moment in time and freeze frame it inside my head for the rest of my life. Somehow, that point in time and space has become a new origin for me and it was all because of the ambience. Some credit does go to the gorgeous bride sitting on her dads knees and the dimple on her chin as she looked down and smiled, but most of the credit goes to the ambience. The sight of a sea of people who had come to bless the union, the sound of those people and the priests wishing you well, the smell of garlands, incense, ghee, camphor, smoke.. it was a combination of all those things!

We did have a registered wedding as well with our parents and a witness, but it pales in comparison to the experience of the "kanyadanam" ceremony! Somehow I would have missed all that in the registered wedding. (San agrees!).

If you are a south Indian bride or groom tossing between a formal wedding ceremony and a registered wedding, go for the formal ceremony, if and only if you will have almost a thousand people at your wedding, both of you are willing to go through that ceremony, you have a priest who explains things in context and most importantly, you have an open mind to a great cultural experience!

It will be worth it!

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