Need help catching Cupid's eye?

‘Love is in the air’ someone said the other day and I promptly looked at the calendar to find myself in the middle of February once again.  

Every time I hear this phrase, by reflex, I tilt my head up and sniff at the air like a hound on a scent only to wipe the drool pooled by the spicy aroma wafting in from my neighbor’s kitchen.  Love, I guess, requires specially designed noses.

My mother was telling me recently over one of our informative phone conversations how very difficult it is these days to find a bride for a boy in India.  According to her, girls in India are now plowing through the field of marriageable boys, harvesting only the best of them after ruthless scrutiny.  Her blessed heart was fretting over the fate of those poor boys that don’t ever make the cut.

And that got me thinking:  Is it time to reveal my secret?   Do I have the right to sit on this anymore when it could potentially change lives?  Knowing that I have the power to make it happen, can I really live with myself if I don’t lend a helping hand to those boys who yearn for their turn to be struck by Cupid’s arrow?  Will the crest-fallen faces of those bearded youth haunt my sleep forever?  

After a whole minute of thinking, I decided to come clean and tell the world about it if only to get back to my dreamless sleep. 

Coming from a conservative South Indian family, my sisters and I owe our timely marriages at the tender age of early twenties to two things.  

  

1.  Good luck – Never underestimate the power of luck in a South-Indian wedding.  How else can you get the kind astrologer to declare your horoscopes ‘MATCHED’?  No matching, no wedding so if the astrologer turns his nose down at your horoscope, you may be Rajinikanth for all the good that will do you.  A conservative South-Indian father would still boot you from here to Amjikkarai.  

So is it any wonder that my sisters and I feel such gratitude for the powers above for lining up the dominoes correctly on our horoscopes?  If the ‘Guru’ on our horoscopes hadn’t winked at his brothers on our spouses’ horoscopes just at the right moment, where would we be today?  God’s grace is bountiful indeed! 

 
2.     Apsaras Photo Studio – This is the secret that I have been safe-guarding all these years.  Second to luck, I owe my ‘mangal sutra’ to this Studio and the time has come for me to reveal it to this world so all mankind can benefit from it.
 
Want to get married?  Go to Apsaras Studio today and get your photo taken.  I guarantee that proposals will start flowing your way before you can sneeze and say’ bless you’.

But WAIT!  This photo is not for the eyes of your prospective girl.  Oh dear lord, no!   Not if you want a fighting chance with the girl.  Pose for the photo, pay for it, then quietly tuck it away like I did because an Apsaras Studio photo is never flattering to the subject and that is God’s honest truth.  

Say, for example, you have a few pimples artfully spread on your face.  Little pomegranate seeds just sprinkled here and there like cilantro in a bowl of ‘Chole’.  Left alone, no one will be the wiser for they don’t attract too much attention other than lending sweetness to that young face, right?  Wrong!  Once Apsaras’s photographer is done with you, each one of those pimples will stand tall as a solder on a battlefield.   

Got small pores on your face?  ‘Yes, but they are hardly noticeable’, you may say.   Wrong again, my friend.  The Apsaras photographer will diligently adjust his lighting and make it his life’s mission to highlight each one of your pores to ensure that ‘posterity will not willingly let them die’.  

I have always wondered about the camera equipment they use.  How special it must really be to be able to zoom in on a standing subject from the bottom to give the subject a very unique ‘bloated’ effect!  Man, was I awestruck when I got my photo back from Apsaras all those years ago!  It reminded me of those Telugu movies on TV about Gods where NT Rama Rao will grow in height and weight by magical proportions to give his devotees a viswaroopa dharisanam.  I looked just like that in the photo.  

Be that as it may, that photo was my ticket to marriage.  Till then, Ragu and his friends residing on my horoscope were most disinterested in cooperating.  Once I subjected myself to a photo session at Apsaras, as if from a trance, dear Guru woke up and winked promptly at the astrologer and the rest, as they say, is history.

 

Happy February to one and all!  May Apsaras Studio continue to be the miracle that will stop all those youngsters in India flocking to a monastery!

PS:  Contact me privately for more details on Apsaras.  Serious inquiries only.

How do you measure love? In grams, gallons or bytes?

If you believe in reincarnation, then you should know that my father is a reincarnation of the famous English poet and philosopher Thomas Gray. My sisters and I will swear on this for we were the only lucky ones privy to our dad’s profound philosophical insights.

As children, we grew up on quotations from Thomas Gray’s poem ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’. The following lines from this poem were discussed so extensively, so often that if I were to wake up from a coma with amnesia a few years from now, I will still recite them without missing a beat.

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.”

Can you think of a better way to teach your children the futility of joining the maddening rat race called life? Dad enriched our childhoods further with acute philosophical observations like ‘Beauty is only skin deep’ every time he caught one of us standing in front of the mirror unashamedly admiring our own reflections, questions like ‘Were we born into this world with the comforts of a fan and a fridge?’ whenever we whined incessantly about the power outages and the unbearable heat of Chennai. It was only natural that we nicknamed him ‘Mr. Gray’.

Now the point of this whole big introduction is to show you that I come from very good erudite stock. Those who believe in the laws of genetics would naturally assume that I would be, at least a little bit, philosophically inclined.

If you had bet your house on that, all I can say is 'oops'. I am afraid you are about to join the ranks of the homeless. Just like weight loss, philosophy eludes me. But determined to thumb my nose at fate and get the hang of this profound thinking business, I had been picking my brain lately about something that I can think profoundly about. I never had this much trouble even when raising toddlers. After hours of exhaustive brain picking, I came up with a question that might convince you that I am my father’s daughter.

How do you measure love? In grams, gallons or bytes?

The commercial on TV that claims ‘some things are priceless but for everything else, there is Master Card’ is based on the assumption that love is not measurable. I can put a big hole in that theory and for this I have my kids to thank for.

Both my kids love me just as much as I love them. I know this because I can measure their love quite easily.

I can measure my youngest child’s love by how many kisses she blows my way every day. The daily count starts in the morning. On her way to the bus stop each morning, she stops after every few steps to turn around and blow kisses to me. It doesn’t bother her that the bus is fully loaded and the driver, parents at the bus stop, the kids aboard the bus are all impatiently waiting for her to hurry and board so they can be on their way. She doesn’t let a little pressure like that deprive me of my daily love dose and always takes the time to blow my quota of kisses before boarding. At last count, she topped her own record with a round 100 kisses a day. Now anything less than 80, I feel unloved.

My eldest child is unique in many ways and all the more so in her expression of her love. She pats my head to show her support and rubs my head in a circular motion to show her affection. Please be sure to note the difference here. To pat is to console while to rub is to love. The more she loves, the harder she rubs. On days when her love for me peaks, I worry a little about premature balding. For now I am using a special herbal hair oil treatment for damage control. The day when all that rubbing leaves behind a hint of a bald spot, I will have to gently redirect her loving hands to rub my arms. Who knows? I might even save some money on salon waxing!

So how do you measure love?

-Meena Sankaran