Were you served, Krishna?

As my regular readers know by now, my excitement levels peak around this time of the year. Starting August, all the way until November almost every other week, there is some festival or the other to celebrate. When all this has died down, comes Christmas and New Year, and customary holiday cheer.

This year my celebration marathon started with Krishna Jayanthi. As usual, Krishna was born all of three days this year. We celebrated on the second day (Sunday) for convenience when in fact by our family traditions we should have actually celebrated on Monday. We had our friends (P, Fa and S) over as well as my bil and his wife.  Since bil’s wife takes a minute to figure out that I am referring to her when I say bil’s wife, for her convenience, I will henceforth refer to them as V&V.

I started at 11 in the morning and cooked up a storm that ended around 6 in the evening. The krishnar who visited our house had a plateful of bakshanams (snacks) – Mul Murukku (a) Manankombu, Rava Seedai (which was quite a breeze considering how apprehensive I was), Appam and Sooyyam. They all turned out really well. He also had a plateful of dinner – the usual pandigai thaligai (festival meal) which always includes paruppu, mor kozhambu, kootu, karamadhu, rasam, vadai and for a sweet, akkaravadisal (which actually ended up being more like sakkarai pongal). He was also served his all-time favorites of milk, navaneetham and aval-vellam.

I had to change his path into the house though. Instead of walking in from the front door, he had to take the more convenient route from the backyard. You see, our home has carpeted floor most of the distance from the front door to the poojai shelf. The route from the backyard however is all on wood and vinyl. So I happily made feet all the way from the lawn till the poojai room, and they turned out bright and neat too.

For calling myself a maami, I actually know very few stotrams. This time however, I made it a point to at least read krishnashtakam out of the book. (I really need to improve my stotram skills a bit more.)

I was soooo happy that everything turned out well this time. I had this nagging feeling that the past few krishna jayanthis had been so unsatisfactory – this time I made up for it. I think this year, Krishna was well served!

Due to popular demand, my own interest and good weather outside the house, I took a few pictures of my krishnar kaals. Here you go…

P.S: I don’t know if any of you iyengars out there have heard of this fabulous book written by an old iyengar maami called Rajalakshmi Raghavan. It is like the bible (or may be gita) for maamis like me who go crazy around pandigai time. It has a list of festivals for every tamil month, plus what food to make, what stotrams to tell, what kolams to draw etc. I only wish it were in English. Thanks to my poor tamil skills, it is quite hard for me to figure out some of the things she has written.

Chicago ‘il Thirumanam – by popular demand

People I personally know who frequent the blog have been asking – ‘So, where is the post on the Chicago Thirumanam’. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing it, but thought people would be bored to read it. But, if you are interested, go ahead and read this, or don’t.

 The Chicago thirumanam went off really well, to everyone’s happiness and satisfaction during the thanksgiving weekend. Yes, it’s now more than a month.

We tried very hard to keep it as close as possible to what it would have been in India. Of course, many of the specimens mentioned in this post, were definitely missing.

We had 2 sessions – the previous evening was the Nischyathartham/Reception. That was followed by the wedding ceremony the next morning.

The crowd was close to 100 people. Most women turned up in silk sarees, and wore the jewellery they had access to in the US. The reception desk at the entrance was unmanned, because there were few young girls in the crowd, and those that could have done it, found it odd to stand by the entrance. All the same, we had a plate full of colourful daisies and sugar or chocolates to sweeten the guest’s mouth as they entered.

In true desi style, like all other desi parties, everything was delayed by a minimum of one hour. Thankfully, the priest who was skilled at either reciting quickly or conveniently omitting the extra frills, managed to have the thali tied, 2 minutes before the end of the muhurtham. Thanks to starting so late, our guest were in time to witness the ceremony too, else we might have had a handful of people, 80% of who would have been white-american. The poor chaps had no idea about the Indian Stretchable Time concept I guess.

In preparation for the wedding, some of the interesting things we did were:

Welcome Board & Vethalai Paaku  bags - The welcome board was handcrafted in exquisite Red gift wrapping paper and adorned by gold glitter to display the names of the bride and groom. No place for the word ‘Welcome’ when I finished. We made sure it was displayed outside the mantapam on both days.

The vethalai Pakku bags were white paper bags. We used half-page labels to print out the bride and groom’s names with the date of the wedding and Thank you written. We had it done in marroon and blue (for women and men). The stickers then were easily applied to the bag. In all I have to admit, it looked very professional. What went inside the bag was- For the men, apple and Bakshanam(Karasev and laddu) bag. For the women, there was manjal, kumkum, apple, ravikai thuni(blouse piece) and a gift.

Nischyathartham plates - Found $1 trays in the local dollar store. Filled them with an assortment of stuff and sealed and tied them with Cling wrap and red and gold ribbon.

Vratha Bakshanam - More $1 trays from dollar store.  No Kai-Murukku experts here, so managed Mul-Murukku in large sizes, Nukkal, Therati paal (from Ricotta cheese), Om-podi, Appam, and bought out Laddu and Mysore Pak.

So, that in brief is a little of what happened those two days.