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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Things that define you

After reading through A bystanders post and Noon's response to my comment in her post,

I had an Epiphany!! (I do not know if the man who taught me that word actually reads this blog! If you do, thanks for introducing that word to me).

I will come straight to the point, although it is no fun...

Does the poonal define me or do I define it?

Or for that matter, is the little Thaayaththu (amulet) that has been on my body since I was 4 define me? (I used to have it around my neck on a black thread and once I got my Poonal, transferred it to the poonal).

Does the thin gold wedding band that I never removed from my finger since the day I got married define me or do I define it?

Does the "I love daddy" trinket, hanging from my rear view mirror define me as a daddy, or the shilouette of two dancers that hangs alongside, which my friend Weeshie Niehaus made for me one Christmas eve define me as a friend or a dancer for that matter?

I really do not know!

At the end of the day, we strive to be a good spouse, parent, child, friend, worker. Somehow in that list, I am not directly trying to be good at being a Hindu or Brahmin or devotee!

If the definition of a good spouse, parent or child involves getting in line with the belief and value system of the other person in that relationship, then you are indirectly striving to show your alignment to religion, culture, rituals and whatever else comes with it (eg. being vegetarian vs. eating meat, dressing in a certain way, visitng a place of worship, affiliation to a place of worship or group, wearing a poonal or mangal sutra, etc.)

When I see the little one prostrate herself and pray at the Shiva Vishnu Temple in Livermore, I wonder...

I did not even teach her to do that!
She just did it by following what I do..
She is happy doing it and expects me to approve when she copied me!

After some time, I thought to myself "Sundar, you are overanalyzing this thing. Sometimes Jr. does the exact opposite of what you do, just to be different or just to piss you off. This is the same girl, who used to copy you to show her conformance, just two years ago!"

All these things do not define the kid.

I reflect on something that happened during my wedding. The late Jambu Saastrigal, who performed our wedding, had nearly lost his eyesight at the time. He was just going by memory. On my insisting, he actually explained the reason and synopsis of every ritual that we performed during that wedding ceremony!

Here is a converstation that is still fresh in my mind. We were all gathered to start a prayer the day before the wedding. It was very early in the morning. As soon as we were ready to start, I took off my shirt, wore my dhoti and sat down.

Jambu Saastrigal (squinting) : Ambi, namaskaram pannu. Unakku dheergaayusu da! (little one, get blessings... You will live a long life!)
Then he went on to say (in translation) "these days the boys who come after studying abroad are so shy that they want to go through the entire wedding ceremony in their Kurtha's. They dont wan't to even remove their shirt!!. and here you are!! all ready in a jiffy.."

to this the second saastrigal in command, says:

"Narayanan payyanaa, kokkaa!" ,which I cannot translate real well. He basically said something to the effect that the apple does not fall far from the tree.. ie., my dad is known for being religious and a stickler for adherence to rituals and so it is no surprise that I am that way. At that point I wanted to puke my guts out, because I am not as religious or ritualistic as my father. I do it 10 times a year and on demand. My father does it 365 days a year. Big difference. However, I saw my dad's eyes light up with pride when he overheard this and I just let sleeping dogs lie..

When I was 3 or 4 years old, Iused to sit on my grandpa's lap every morning when he used to recite vedic verses, Valmiki Ramayana or pieces of Upanishads during his morning prayer. Some of those things have gone into my permanent memory and I can recite these if I have to. These days, I just thank my genes for my memory and leave it at that.

Like I have said in the past, to each his/her own! My personal take on this :

How we interpret the level of influence of social, cultural and religious practice in our life does not define us. How we learn to be at peace with what we do, irrespective of the reasons, is what defines us.

The end goal is to be comfortable with oneself! At least mine is!

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