Bajaao Band Baja

-
When I write about single women, I feel bad about hurting their sentiments. They are at a sensitive stage of life. They are touchy. I was like this. After a point, I had stopped meeting my married friends as we had nothing common to talk. Even now I don't know how to mix my single friends with married ones. Single ones are looking whose marriage is not working and married ones are looking at whose marriage is. In our society there is a pressure and need to get married.
Research proves that a woman's breaths are very shallow. It is like they do not even have a right to breathe in a male dominated world.
Living at my new house, I am reminded of Dhanbad constantly. There will be a long piercing honking like the trekkers there. No reason is required to have a procession, so there is one everyday. I don't mean the political ones. These are the happy ones where people are not paid to attend. In fact you do not belong, you cannot even join the dancing on the roads. One thing common is the Band walas or the Banjo walas as we called them. They play the same music. Do you think there is an academy which trains these people to play this music and to the encourage people to be lost in this revellery. My husband detests these band bajas which start at any unearthly hour which is definitely a siesta or a deep sleep time. I just love them. They make me feel happy. So now that I have become a city bum, I pretend to dislike. But the truth is , these bands , visarjan music, dhol all bring a smile to my face. The gujju in me also feels good if I can be happy without spending. Most of the times, we can be happy without spending.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Nange Paon in Navratri

-
When I was working and staying in the hostel, I kind of stopped believing in most festivals and rituals. I thought all this was some weird things which people did, it had no scientific base and why should I follow anyone. In the college hostel, vacations were time to go home and not connected with any festival except Diwali. Sophia College hostel was a cocoon in the heart of South Mumbai. The campus with an old palace building was a quiet oasis with trees and birds, in the mayhem of Mumbai. No festival touched it unless the college celebrated it. The Polytechnic had rock shows and one Dandiya night every year, which it soon stopped having by 1988. Only celebration was the Vegetable Biryani in lunch on Sundays. The Polytechnic hostel did not even believe in pampering the children with food. Memories of bread being there round the clock for breakfast, lunch, tea and dinner. For them, while the non vegetarians ate eggs for breakfast, the vegetarian had bread. And then when non vegetaria
Read more

Antakshari

-
Today we were playing antakshari at the Holi get together. We did not know any new songs so naturally only the golden melodies were being sung. The whole generation playing antakshari was singing the similar era songs on the alphabets they got. I realised a couple of things. In English language there is no game like Antakshari. How many sentences end with I or The? How can you sing when most songs start with I, The, Once, When and How?I cannot resist explaining the game, we all grow up with, in India. Antakshari means Ant : end , Akshar: alphabet ie last letter of the word. Akshar also means God. It also means God has the last word. Its a game with two teams and we call the teams as  'party'.  We say "Baithey baithey kya karein, karna hai kuchh kaam, shuru karo antakshari , le ka Hari ka naam." Translated from Hindi, We are sitting idle, lets do some work, lets start antakshari, starting with God's name. In Indian games, there is a lot of religion or belief in Go
Read more

Shraddh period in Hinduism

-
According to the Hindu calendar, this is the shraddh period going on.  For fifteen days in a year, the ancestors are remembered and prayed to. No auspicious events / ceremonies take place in this time. People use the tithi/date of death to invite a Pandit and feed the departed soul. It means you remember the person passed away, give food to the Pandit and the crows. People keep a cooked meal on the terrace. They try to make the favourite food of the departed person. My memories are of my Grandma mixing and crushing all the savouries with her hands and when it was in form of  a paste, my Uncle would go to the terrace and throw the food for the crows. Crows in Hinduism are considered messengers of the departed souls. A lot of people feed Gathiyas to the crows for the full year. If your ancestors are happy, then your life goes well ,is the general belief amongst Hindus. The shraddh period falls exactly between Ganpati and Navratri. One does not buy a house or have a wedding in this time.
Read more