Happy Pongal! Today is India's thanksgiving. Actually, I'll quickly take that back with an apology. Thanksgiving is America's version of Pongal. There! That sounds so much better :)
As a city bred kid, with exposure to a closer-to-the-earth lifestyle limited to only during our spirituality-soakedpilgrimages vacations spent hopping through temple towns (Amma and appa, to reiterate a point that I have made many times, visiting Thirupparankundram, waking up early to take our place in a snaking line that never moved was N.O.T my idea of vacations!), Pongal meant little besides a cluster of holidays at the beginning of the calendar year. A day that started with shouting, upon being strongly coaxed, Pongalo pongal and consuming loads of ghee laden pongal and sakkarai pongal.
My idea of celebrating farmers and their profession was marked by consuming a more than usual quantity of their produce, then allowing ourselves to be assaulted by special patti mandrams (well intentioned literary debates in the days of Doordarshan that, with the proliferation of channels and a dearth of quality debaters, soon ran out of good topics and started pandering to the masses by debating just about any topic under the sun accompanied by off key renditions of cinema songs and thus spoiled it for everybody, but I digress. Sigh.) on TV and complaining the day after about crowds yet again trashing the Marina beach on kaanum pongal.
It was our mother, by virtue of her having done a fair bit of growing up in villages, who was the lone torch bearer when it came to infusing life into Pongal celebrations in our household. Between us two kids and to some extent our father, we favored urban, muted and toned down means of offering our gratitude to the sun and the farmers.
Although at its own sweet pace, time changes everything. Age, experience, growing up - all play a hand in changing one's perceptions. One such testimony is here. Today, Pongal isn't a day off where I live, yet I'm truly thankful to the powers that be for granting bountiful, even if erratic, harvests around the world. There are no groups of people trashing the city to complain about but I'm genuinely thankful to the farmers toiling in farms all over God's earth for their produce that nourishes us. And today the silence is broken not by noisy debates on TV but as the whistle blows on the pressure cooker, I'm thankful that I have been blessed with the means to gather the ingredients, a wife to make them into yummy pongal (both varieties), a son to share it with and a place to call home to keep us warm from the winter. The top 1% club? I'm in.
Big bang theory (not the TV show, but that too), pulsating universe, expanding, shrinking, creation theory - whatever your ideological leanings may be, one must take the time today, or any other day assigned by your culture, to pause and appreciate that the most important things in life - that the sun will rise in the east, that day shall follow night and photosynthesis - that we take for granted can indeed be taken for granted. At least for the foreseeable future. And also that you and me can neither control nor meddle too much with the important stuff.
An everyday lesson, if you are listening, showing us our rightful place in the universe - cosmic dust.
As a city bred kid, with exposure to a closer-to-the-earth lifestyle limited to only during our spirituality-soaked
My idea of celebrating farmers and their profession was marked by consuming a more than usual quantity of their produce, then allowing ourselves to be assaulted by special patti mandrams (well intentioned literary debates in the days of Doordarshan that, with the proliferation of channels and a dearth of quality debaters, soon ran out of good topics and started pandering to the masses by debating just about any topic under the sun accompanied by off key renditions of cinema songs and thus spoiled it for everybody, but I digress. Sigh.) on TV and complaining the day after about crowds yet again trashing the Marina beach on kaanum pongal.
It was our mother, by virtue of her having done a fair bit of growing up in villages, who was the lone torch bearer when it came to infusing life into Pongal celebrations in our household. Between us two kids and to some extent our father, we favored urban, muted and toned down means of offering our gratitude to the sun and the farmers.
Although at its own sweet pace, time changes everything. Age, experience, growing up - all play a hand in changing one's perceptions. One such testimony is here. Today, Pongal isn't a day off where I live, yet I'm truly thankful to the powers that be for granting bountiful, even if erratic, harvests around the world. There are no groups of people trashing the city to complain about but I'm genuinely thankful to the farmers toiling in farms all over God's earth for their produce that nourishes us. And today the silence is broken not by noisy debates on TV but as the whistle blows on the pressure cooker, I'm thankful that I have been blessed with the means to gather the ingredients, a wife to make them into yummy pongal (both varieties), a son to share it with and a place to call home to keep us warm from the winter. The top 1% club? I'm in.
Big bang theory (not the TV show, but that too), pulsating universe, expanding, shrinking, creation theory - whatever your ideological leanings may be, one must take the time today, or any other day assigned by your culture, to pause and appreciate that the most important things in life - that the sun will rise in the east, that day shall follow night and photosynthesis - that we take for granted can indeed be taken for granted. At least for the foreseeable future. And also that you and me can neither control nor meddle too much with the important stuff.
An everyday lesson, if you are listening, showing us our rightful place in the universe - cosmic dust.
No comments:
Post a Comment