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Souce: Gautam Iyengar and Pinterest
Small Things…
Monthly Archives: September 2019
Daughter’s Day
It’s the fourth Sunday in the month of September.
A repeat here, makes an appropriate start for the occasion. Translated, it reads:
‘When you pray seeking a son, god graces you with one.
When you pray seeking god himself, you beget a daughter.’
It’s no part of our tradition to celebrate days such as daughter’s, mother’s or father’s as far as I recall, though we certainly celebrate their birthdays in line with the family tradition. May be, as many suspect, it’s a very clever marketing ploy engineered and advanced by retail and fmcg industries. So what? It certainly serves as a yet another reminder to us, lost in the daily hustle and bustle, to find time and give special attention to people dear to us.
Mercifully the plight of daughters in our families is not what it was years ago. In many many families, they are more educated than the sons, empowered and financially independent too. Instances of they stepping in where the sons fail in their duty by the family or there are no sons are not uncommon. We’ve known girls exclusively looking for grooms who would let them stay close to their parents and/or financially support them after marriage with their income. A far cry from the age and time when distortions like Sati, dowry harassment and female feticide had over time crept into certain sections of a society (the last two not totally eliminated even now though on the wane) that always worshipped more goddesses than gods. Today one hears of many a glass ceiling broken to smithereens by girls in their single-minded pursuit of life/career goals, often starting off from humble beginnings. Quite often all these while still keeping the structure of traditional marriage intact!
It is these daughters who would be giving India an unassailable competitive advantage – the available workforce just gets doubled at all levels and often with better quality, application and stability.
Rounding up with a visual ode to the doughty daughters – verily, children – trying against odds to making it in life for themselves and their families:
In Pushkar Mela
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Source: WildFilmsIndia, Nov 9, 2014, 100% சிரிப்பு இலவசம், etc.
A Debt Impossible To Discharge
16th of September is an unforgettable day for me – the day a few years ago my old lady (80+) quit on me saying enough is enough. She had carried on gamely all these years hosting ailments in her body that sent doctors routinely back to their books.
With great grand-daughter
This day is also unforgettable for another reason.
In those dark hours following her last breath, I was barely registering what was happening around me and what needed to be done thereafter. You could say I didn’t handle it well; for, after all the lady had lived a full life and was in and out of hospitals in the later years. But then a mother is a mother at any age, had been with her all these years under the same roof. A simple soul, lived not an easy life uncomplainingly, bore rancour towards none, often giving out profound wisdom in her own un-guru like ways. And, I had desperately wanted her to come back from the brink like she did on earlier occasions. Sadly it was not to be this time.
Fortunately I had two veritable angels – no other kith or kin – TRS and SRK (cousin), standing by me taking care of everything save lighting the funeral pyre which I did. And, thanks in no small measure to their spouses, U and V, for their support.
Much later, I learnt the day TRS spent with me in the hospital and the crematorium was his birthday! And SRK had his aged mother (my atthai) living with him who could not be left alone!
So it is today.
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The Wait
Words On Life
What Matters Is…
Emotions are fleeting while Attitude is but an abstraction of you lingering in people’s heads to which they respond in their cold thoughts.
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Sanmargam 