This year is the year of weddings for our team and as of now, all of them will be Kerala weddings. We have four of them involving 6 of our colleagues, all lined up in the first half of the year and my neighbour will start the proceedings next week. In fact, another one also sits in my bay of 3 people and you can imagine the excitement around me. It is one thing to pull their legs and smile when they blush but another to be extracting any kind of work from them, though thankfully I'm not their boss. Throughout the day they do nothing but plan their wedding attires and mehendis online(as if it's for ten weddings!) and do all sorts of chats. One of them will move to the US after marrying and I told her she'd better show that she could work independently if she wanted to work from home. Don't think that has made any lasting impact though.
In another coastal area, my native place, desperate efforts are on to secure a bride for my cousin of 28 years, who is not into a white-collar job. These days guys who are looking after their plantations and parents/grandparents are finding it really hard to get married there because typically girls are studying well and becoming at least teachers easily and expect to get relocated to a city after usually marrying an engineer. We as a community did not have the concept of dowry but now we have one. Guys are looking far and wide for a bride and in some cases as far as Jammu and Kashmir also, with the only condition that the girl should be a vegetarian. The lucky ones end up paying anywhere between 50k to 2 lakhs to the girls' parents, apart from bearing all costs of the wedding. It is just the opposite of the general trend of guys getting everything and my aunt says that the situation becomes really bad if the grandparents are also at home, the girl's family treating it as an additional burden on their daughter. Even the unaffected families are bewildered by the novelty of the situation and ladies are often seen lamenting on how respectfully guys used to be treated once upon a time.
Actually my mother tells me that this is only an aggravation of an old story and reminds me of Kumudakka, wife of her father's cousin, who hailed from Kerala. I saw her in my grandmother's place on the occasion of my grandpa's shradhdha every April and she provided a comic relief to the children and elders alike, though I guess only ladies, on account of her funny Kannada. She had assimilated well into the family and acquired a reputation of a hardworker but as if she had got tired of it all somewhere, mixed up the masculine and neutral genders all the time, making it very hard for us not to burst into laughter right on her face.
In another coastal area, my native place, desperate efforts are on to secure a bride for my cousin of 28 years, who is not into a white-collar job. These days guys who are looking after their plantations and parents/grandparents are finding it really hard to get married there because typically girls are studying well and becoming at least teachers easily and expect to get relocated to a city after usually marrying an engineer. We as a community did not have the concept of dowry but now we have one. Guys are looking far and wide for a bride and in some cases as far as Jammu and Kashmir also, with the only condition that the girl should be a vegetarian. The lucky ones end up paying anywhere between 50k to 2 lakhs to the girls' parents, apart from bearing all costs of the wedding. It is just the opposite of the general trend of guys getting everything and my aunt says that the situation becomes really bad if the grandparents are also at home, the girl's family treating it as an additional burden on their daughter. Even the unaffected families are bewildered by the novelty of the situation and ladies are often seen lamenting on how respectfully guys used to be treated once upon a time.
Actually my mother tells me that this is only an aggravation of an old story and reminds me of Kumudakka, wife of her father's cousin, who hailed from Kerala. I saw her in my grandmother's place on the occasion of my grandpa's shradhdha every April and she provided a comic relief to the children and elders alike, though I guess only ladies, on account of her funny Kannada. She had assimilated well into the family and acquired a reputation of a hardworker but as if she had got tired of it all somewhere, mixed up the masculine and neutral genders all the time, making it very hard for us not to burst into laughter right on her face.
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