Skip to main content

Big Event

A young lady in my parents' neighborhood is getting married and its the biggest celebration in their para after Durga Puja and Diwali. I know for a fact that my parents like S a lot. She is a very pleasant, easy to get along with, happy to spend time with the elderly, and is an amazing vocalist. S is only a few years older than J so that is another reason for their affinity for her. I would have expected my mother to be excited for her wedding given her closeness to the family. But she only complained about how out of hand celebrations of all kinds has grown - people just need and excuse for a shindig even while everything around them is falling apart. The ranks of the unemployed and underemployed keeps growing, the elderly are on their own without any safety net, the infrastructure is stressed beyond help and yet people are looking for every excuse to have fun. 

She thinks the world around her has gone crazy. S's wedding party has turned into a week of non-stop entertainment for all. There is a lot of food and music involved at every turn. Somewhere in the middle of all that a young woman is getting married and starting on a journey that should ideally last for life. That does not seem to be on anyone's mind - all this pomp and circumstance for the big event but none whatsoever for the wedded life. The noise and bustle of the wedding party which is on track to overshadow Durga Puja is the main story - it is how everyone will remember it in time to come. My mother says she can only be there for the key milestones that define a traditional Bengali wedding and even then not for the whole time - the level of song, dance and food involved is making her disoriented. 

She says she wishes S the very best but cannot participate in the insanity as she describes it. Next time I speak to her, I have to ask her if she is aware of anyone who is trying to make at least a partial break with tradition and going a different direction with the Bengali wedding instead of turning it into something like a Bollywood production. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques