?!?

As I laze around an afternoon, I suddenly see a parchment fluttering within a book. With high hopes of it being an ‘owl-post’ from our very Hogwarts and dreams of being a witch, I hastily explored its contents only to find…

Weird letters filling weirder boxes, innumerable numbers decorating the sides on a faded parchment. Faint ink filling the rest of the pages with a language as twisted as the one spoken by the cast of Junoon.

Little known words like Gothram, Brihacharanam, Bagam, etc pop up now and then……

WHAT THE HECK IS THIS?!?

HORRORSCOPE, I discover! No…no, that wasn’t a spelling mistake! What else will you call it if all it does is seal your fate, curb your ambitions and puts a fullstop to all that is desired?

Well, well, now that they are looking out for a ‘suitable groom’ (I hate this word… I hate it!!!)for my cousin, all sorts of questions run through my mind…

I agree that to a certain extent horoscopes do havesome scientific validity. But beyond that, its all rubbish,I say! Horoscopes are devised based on the time of birth. Based on planetary positions, they devise your chart. And I hate this match-making process based on this. Just because you were born at 11:59, your life with this person would be a joy filled one and had you been born at 12:00, woe be upon you!!!

What crap, I say!

Now leave alone horoscopes, come to the demands that these groom’s family makes. While scanning a newspaper under the ‘Brides Wanted’ column, my periamma saw this ad:
“Wanted: Fair, Beautiful, Tall, Domestically trained(Cooking, must), Well educated, Well trained in Music, Dance, Drama, Should get along well with family, Working bride for…..”

As my cousin remarked, “Even Brahma wouldn’t know such perfection!”
What the hell do they think? Are women some commodities? And the questions these people ask when they call up is so nigh irritating!!!
“ Ponnodu passport size photo-onnu, stamp size photo-rendu, aprom one more copy of jaadagam!” they demand.
(Send one passport size photograph and two stamp size photographsalong withone more copy of the horoscope!)

This, they ask, when they don’t send the boy’s photo or horoscope.

With all this to face already, the horoscope poses more problems. The Gothram or the sect tops my list of ‘MOST IDIOTIC THINGS IN THE WORLD’.
When a woman gets married, her gothram changes from her father’s to her husband’s, which is crap no 1.
Crap no 2: when a girl gets married, she shouldn’t marry a boy of the same gothram as they are considered brother-sister. As Vani and I discovered, if the girl gets married into the Gothram which once was her mother’s, won’t she be a sister/ cousin of that boy? Ah… there you got it.

Once, I was entrusted the task of marking out suitable matches for my cousin from this horoscope chart. Initially all I did was look at the qualification and saw a crore and one Software professionals that made my stomach somersault. ARE THERE NO OTHER PROFESSIONS???
Then forgetting this, I moved on to delect the suitable matches. Then ‘asareri’(some divine voice) maathri, I heard “Sandhya, look at the names of the boys too… What if one happened to be a Sansiyan or a Sanklipan(these names, being my little sister’s characters in her story and being names I love much more than Abithakujalambal and BalathirupuraSundari.But having forgotten to include them in my tag, I’m adding them here… Ok…Track Change…). Yeah, so what if the guys had weirdo names? It wouldn’t go well with my cousin’s… So I began to scan the name column…
Imagine my horror when I found my periappa pointing to one of the boys I had marked saying this seems to match and to my utter disbelief, the name alongside was ‘Koundinya’! I yelled, at the top of my voice with an exaggeratedly dramatic movement with my hands-“NO!!! I will not have akka married off to a guy with an awful name like Koundinya!”
“Idiot! That’s not his name. That’s the Gothram,”my mother said and all of them laughed, while I sat their like a silly goose!

Koundinya, Shoundilya, Bharadwaj, Kousika, Kapi, Shadamarshana, Kaashyapa Gothrams with mine being Sankrithi gothram, are few of the gothrams I found out from my thatha.( A request, I’m making a ‘Gothram Database’ to record the most different names in the planet. Please contribute to in by commenting and addingthe names you know. If you don’t, do ask and add. It is very interesting and funny)

But when I did find out that these Gothrams were sort of the priciples followed by Munis and rishis of that name, I quite liked the concept. But why bring in all these in a marriage, I still find no reason.
Idhukku mela, there is the sub sect… what it is, I don’t know and didn’t bother to enquire…. But the other day when Vani’s mother enquired me about it for giving some horoscopes for my cousin, I was stumped. “Eh, aunty… I don’t know. You give me some examples, I’ll pick from them…” I blabbered like an idiot. But try as she might, I really couldn’t find out what it was. Coming home I discovered it was Brihacharanam.
Sect tho, I knew because, I’ve heard the priests in the temples go “:Sankrithi Gothra na na na naaaa…” and so on…

Well its sooooo confusing an very stupid. In an age where inter-caste, inter-race marriages are a common occurrence, I think marriages stopped because of a clash in gothrams and sub-sects are highly stupid. I do believe that marrying out of caste, may lead to some adjustment problems, but within the caste, bringing in these obsolete things is really dumb.

I might have hurt religious sentiment through this. But it was unintentional. I’m proud of my religion and for being what I am. But if there is something within it, that I oppose, I WILL say so!

And hey, don’t forget to add on to my ‘Gothram Database’!!! : )