Inge Brahmanan

I have earlier written here "enge Brahmanan" (Where is the brahmin), and today i write "Inge Brahmanan" (Heres the brahmin).
I am elated to present Sri Vittaldas, an aspiring brahmin who wished to build a temple for the lord he worships.
Although i dont know much about him, there are some interesting and inspiring aspects of this person. This person is a brahmin, and collects funds to build the temple. To do this within the rules laid by brahminism, he collects funds by performing bhajans throught the country. He has never gone out of the country. He says that although he could potentially earn lots more than what he can within the country, he has decided not to step out in order to maintain the integrity of his ancestors. And adhering to so many such rules, he has collected funds to build a massive temple for his God. He had visited Hyderabad for a whole week to collect funds to finish the construction. The temple is at govindapuram, Kumbakonam district, and is bigger than the actual Vittal Temple in Pandarpur. He has been singing bhajans making us feel relaxed and energized throught the week, and doing some preaching in the most hilarious way possible.
Yesterday, (UNFORTUNATELY) the bhajans were amazing, and i missed it. the first day of the bhajan, i stopped clapping when my palms started aching, the next day, i stopped after my forearms started aching, the next day when my entire arm started aching, and then, i did not stop clapping even if it hurt me. As a matter of fact, i enjoyed it when i was clapping so hard. Yesterday it went so ecstatic that the musicians were also enthusiastic that the tabla tore.
And he has been doing all this in hyderabad inspite of ill health.
This man maintains the essence of brahminism and yet keeps himself updated of modern developments and employing them ideally in life.
I am proud to be a brahmin, and proud to say that the ideal brahmin lives even in the Kalyuga.

What does the dad of a 3 year old do?

I see many things a day that interest me. Some are just so beautiful / amazing that I d like to write in the blog. But about 90% of the times, I am distracted by some annoying forces. And only 1 % of the things make it to the blog.

Today is one such day. I’ve been horribly disturbed. In fact this disturbance has been there since last night which did not end very well today.

Now, I’ve decided, that I will be the one who d put the actual end, I also decided that I shall not let be impedance in not letting me put this interesting thing here.

I came across an article which says that children say “my father goes to office” not knowing what exactly the man does. Very small kids sure do that, but the older ones saying that is sad and rather alarming as to where the society is going!

But by the end of it, I was reminded as to what I knew about my dad and how I could tell about his work.

When I was a really young kid, my dad was a successful industrialist. So he would go to the office to handle the administration and to the factory to handle the manufacture. Every Thursday the laborers were given their weekly off in the factory (and Thursday was a day in my school where we did not have homework. This was till class 7 or 8. So I loved Thursdays all the more)

So I had another place to tell people. I d tell “my dad goes to office and factory, What about yours?” and people used to follow up with my parents on that for further clarification. Then at one time, my mom decided to enlighten me about what exactly my dad does. So in her story she told even about what the “often seen” staff did. [This all happened when I was somewhere around 3 or 4 years] The story ended with “so after doing all these things (of which I understood NOTHING), daddy gets money to buy you things from the shop.” [I must give her the due credits, that this story of hers helped me understand the circular flow of money in economics, macro and micro economics well even before it was a part of my syllabus when I started growing]

Then on, whenever anyone asked me as to what my father did, I started telling “he makes money”

If I heard any kid saying that today, I d appreciate that kid, as money is THE thing for which one works. But the sad thing was that, people reported this to my parents appreciating me, and it rang their bells. They thought that if this continued, people would think he was a manufacturer or fake notes or gets money by forming some mafia gang secretly. Apparently there were some scams of that sort happening, and they didn’t want to get in trouble for not doing it.

I can never forget that night. I was put between both my parents in the bed, and the whole night, I was not allowed to sleep, but was bombarded with lessons, that I shouldn’t tell things of that sort coz some nasty folks would think of it otherwise. This lecture followed with another teaching me how to actually respond to such questions. This continued till I got into the auto where I was again asked “what would you tell if someone asked you this?”

Asking a 3 or 4 year old sound odd to me, and I m not very happy about this habit of the elders. Asking family details to kids is really dangerous.  More than that I would say it is something of a criminal motive to encash the fact that a child is excited to talk out what it sees at home, and learns from places, and it hasn’t yet learnt how to lie.