December 26, 2011
The appeal for a city-wide hartal from the BJP was more or less rejected by the citizens. Plenty of shops remained closed but private vehicles and government bus service operated. First hand knowledge because I took a long walk, of about 25 minutes, to the Sree Mulam Club to attend a wedding.
The first wedding for which I was invited through facebook!
The auspicious time was between 11:55am and 12:45pm, so I set off from home around 11:10 in the am.
The milk stall right up the street from home was open because newspapers, milk and deaths are usually exempted from political agitations of this kind. I don't know what the point of the exemption to newspapers today was since the regional papers had no edition owing to the Christmas holiday yesterday. May be the Hindu-leaning party was expressing its wishful thinking of an India where Christmas won't be a holiday.
The hartal meant a day off for the immigrant construction laborers in the city. I passed three of them while walking out of the colony. They were speaking some language from the eastern side of India, I couldn't be sure if it was Bengali. Two of the men were holding hands in the platonic Indian way and the third and slightly better dressed one was sharing a joke with them. Before reaching the wedding hall, I met a few more of these laborers but this time mostly from Tamil Nadu and Andhra.
The temple was closed but the lottery ticket stall and the flower shop next to it were open. Opening a lottery ticket stall right next to a temple is business genius. Location, location, location indeed! Even more genius is to run lottery sales from a car. You can keep changing your location, location, location. Such a car parked outside the Tagore theater. Three men were purchasing their tickets to fortune through the rider side window.
Sober, reverential expressions while they tucked the tickets into their wallets.
Prayerful silence.
The car's windsheild was covered with a banner announcing "Karunya" (mercy) lottery with a bumper prize of Rs. 1 crore!
Owing to the hartal, police jeeps were parked every 100 meters or so. Khaki-clad policemen and women half way between them. May be the high density of such dutiful guarding came from the presence of the police headquarters and forensics labs are on this road. Incredibly muscular forearms on the police woman on duty next to the bus stop. I wouldn't want to be interrogated by her.
Enormous crowd at the petrol station. Hyundai, Ford, Hyndai, Suzuki, Hyundai, Suzuki, Tata...went the line. Motorbikes had a separate queue made of several parallel lines.
On the exiting bikes, judging from the joy of young pinion riders holding full bottles in both hands, you would think the brown liquid in them wasn't petrol.
Drastic reduction in the number of autorickshaws plying today. This meant more pedestrians with open umbrellas despite the wintry sun and shady trees lining the road. I was reminded of the big fuzz in the US about display of religious icons in public places when I passed the Trivandrum Development Authority building. Inside the gardenesque round-about of its driveway are an armed Rama, a seated Ganapati and a flute-playing Krishna. Further away there is a secular pert breasted water-bearer statue with inappropriately peeling silver paint.
Past a Ramakrishna Mission temple, I notice a threesome of bicycles leaning on each other finding final support on the temple wall. Abandoned student transport flashback from A&M campus!
The small signboard near them announces that they are part of the rent-a-bike program in the city. There are details about the mobile numbers to contact and txt msgs that need to be send to avail the service. I wonder how long these bicycles will last unprotected in the sun and rain.
A crane on the footpath. Not the civil engineering kind, the organic one, with wings, beak and jet white plumage. The one with the glorious natural symmetry that will outlast all man-made geometries!
It was totally unafraid of the other bipeds users of the footpath. Yesterday morning I had noticed a bluish grey bird on a frond of the neighbor's coconut tree. Since it was solitary, I presumed it was a heron and not a crane, but I couldn't be sure since I didn't see it take off. Herons withdraw their long, flexible necks during flight, cranes stick them out. While coming back after the wedding, I saw that a mate had joined the footpath white crane. Ivory cranes and ebony crows together dealing with the city's garbage situation.
The impressive turn out at the wedding was proof enough that the hartal was at best partial. Guests sporting sartorial splendor. The murmur of relationships. Exquisitely decorated dais and hall.
Lustrous lilac and cream curtains.
Gigantic heart shapes made with white and red daisies.
The backdrop of the dais curtained with garlands of jasmine interspersed with garlands of red roses. These floral curtains were topped by three bronze tiaras that gave them the appearance of the floral veils worn by grooms in North India.
Two filigreed frames with metal vines and flowers defined the edges of the dais. The setting was so elegant that I didn't want to degrade it with a cellphone photograph.
The bride was currently from Dubai and the groom from USA meant that there was no dearth of cameras of all kinds at the venue. Besides the seven dudes who looked "official", there were at least a dozen amateurs faithfully recording the proceedings.
I got the chance to say hello to the bride before the ceremony. Petite and smart with a dynamite wit, she had played the part of a worried mother to perfection in one of my plays back at A&M. Today, she was a very pretty bride. The sacred thread was tied at 12:09 pm according to the massive clock at the hall with the sponsor name 'Paramount' on its face.
According to the receipts we received from the stall of Kerala Sahitya (literature) Academy at the book fair recently, their website is www.kerala'shity'akedmi.org!
I don't know if this typo reflects the legendary sense of humor of the original poets of Malayalam. It reminded me of a Houston restaurant that had "shag" paneer as a chef's specialty on the menu with the caveat that he needed to be told in advance for a party of over 12! Obviously!
The actual website of the Sahitya academy, spelled correctly, is far from 'shity'!
Mostly because they have digitized copies of several volumes of 'Rasika Ranjini' magazine from early last century. This magazine was edited by Kunjikuttan Thampuran. I spent a good chunk of the day reading through some of its articles on old Malayalam texts, the arrival of the Portuguese and Sankaracharya.
My frustration with the lack of dating on most of the ancient text stems from my ignorance. I need to familiarize myself with the Kadapayadi system of numbers that I had mentioned before in these notes. It was the popular tradition. Each numeral is associated with a particular set of letters. To notify a date or any number, a meaningful word or verse would be created from those letters and inserted in the text. The more talented the poet/writer the better he would be able to unobstrusively make the insertion so that it falls in place with the rest of the material. Couple of days back, reading an essay on Kunjikuttan Thampuran, I learnt that in a small verse he composed about Shankaracharya, he had cryptically mentioned the birth year of Shankara to be 37 years before the beginning of the Malayalam era. Dating was done either using the Malayalam era or the ancient Kalpa calendar that goes back thousands of years.
My hips tell me that the long walk this morning might have been a bit ambitious!
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