Festivals of India: Pongal O Pongal

Posted on January 15, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

This week all over India, various communities will be celebrating/would have celebrated their Harvest festivals. In the southern part of India, specifically Tamil Nadu, today is the day that is celebrated as Pongal.

Not to be confused with the yummy sweet and salt Pongal dishes, the festival of Pongal is a harvest festival celebrated by Tamil people all over the world around 13-16 January each year. This is a four day festival which is according to the Gregorian calendar, unlike most Hindu festivals, which are based on the lunar calendar and marks the start of the sun’s six-month long journey northwards or Uttarayan as it’s called in Sanskrit. This is also celebrated as Makar Sankranti in other parts of India.

The word Pongal in Tamil means ‘overflowing’ and signifies abundance and prosperity. The celebrations for the four day festival start with ‘Bhogi Pongal’ with the worship of Lord Indra, the ruler of clouds and rains to thank him for a season of good rainfall and to make sure he blesses the farmer with just enough rain to ensure abundant harvest. The next day is ‘Thai Pongal’ which is the main festival day. People wake up before sunrise and bathe and get ready and at the time of sunrise, ritually boil fresh milk and let it overflow the earthern pot it is being boiled in. When the boiling happens, people shout “Pongalo Pongal” which means “Let there be prosperity and abundance everywhere”. The third day is set aside for the animals in the household called ‘Mattu Pongal‘ to give them thanks for the work they do helping the farmer with his harvest. The farm animals, specifically the bulls and cows are scrubbed up and decorated and treated with goodies. The last day is a time for family reunions, called ‘Kaanum Pongal‘ where brothers give their married sisters special gifts and employers gift their employees. This marks the end of the Pongal festivities for the year.

Other harvest festivals celebrated in India include Bihu in Assam, Lohri in Punjab and Makar Sankranti in Gujarat, my home state of Maharashtra and other states in India

This is basically a festival meant to thank the Sun God for a good harvest and has been celebrated for more than 1000 years, though some historians say it’s older than that.

Culture is important for a human being. You need to know where you come from, what your values are, so that, as custodians of the next generation, you are able to pass it on. This post is so BB & GG know where they come from and are able to pass it to their children and grand-children!

A Cousin a Day keeps the Boredom Away

Posted on January 14, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

“Nobody will understand the craziness of your family better than your cousins”

Cousins are your friends by blood. Not everyone, especially these days of smaller families have cousins who are with them through thick and thin.

My mom is the oldest of four sisters and my dad is the oldest of a younger brother and sister. We’re closer to my mom’s family. My dad lost his sister when I was in school and his brother moved away when I was real young and now we are not in contact with him or his family! I feel real sad that I don’t know my cousins from his side – I have not met them (two boys) in the last 15-18 years and they must be adults now (I last saw them when they were 4 & 8!) I sometimes joke with my dad that if I ever pass them in the street, they would be random strangers to me, that’s how out of touch we are!

I’m the oldest of eight cousins from my maternal side, dominated by girls. Between me and the youngest there’s an 11 year gap. We’re six girls and two boys.

Growing up, we were close, but since we’d meet maybe once a year if lucky, it was not that “tell you all my secrets” type of closeness. Plus, because of the eleven year gap, when I was say fifteen, my youngest cousins were like three or four! I even have memories of my second last cousin’s birth! I remember seeing her as a new-born in the hospital and since she was born in early March, I distinctly remember going to my grandmother’s home for our summer holidays in April/May and being with her. I have memories of begging my aunt to let me hold her and I would sit patiently with her on my lap when my aunt went for a bath or did something else.

However, as we grew up, the age gap somehow closed and we could relate to each other and instead of growing apart, we grew closer!

Thanks to Facebook, emails and social media we got even closer, sharing photos and milestones. It was great, but somehow we were not able to meet due to distances, schedules and what have you. Currently, we’re scattered all over the world – Hong Kong, Singapore, India, UK, USA and Canada – you get the picture right, when someone is free in one part of the world, the others are busy in another!

However it was last year, when one of my youngest cousins got married, we really started connecting with each other. Before the wedding, we started a Whatsapp group to discuss what to give her. This was something we started when the first one of us got married. In addition to the family gift with the parents, we wanted to give something special to our cousin and at that time, with hardly anyone working, it used to be small. Now that we can afford it, it’s more expensive.

It was great fun at the wedding – we had the time of our lives and missed the one cousin who could not make it. Then we decided to keep in touch more since it was so much fun and since then there’s hardly a day when texts are not pinging their way across the globe.

Cousins brighten up your life so much, that I hope BB & GG also have the same relationship with their cousins, both first and second (aka children of my cousins)

2015 Week 1: Weekly Update

Posted on January 11, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

I thought of putting down what happened this week here so I have a kind of running update on my life!

This week was a mixed bag one – on one hand work has been good, but health is not so good.

Work: A good week, where my views for our forthcoming event was considered. So far 2015 has started well and my fingers are crossed that this continues for the rest of the year. A project I have been working for almost a year is seeing completion and I hope this will auger well for me.

Health: I had a good number of health goals for the year and this week was not a very good one, need to step up to the plate on this! I exercised 5 days this week while my goal was six days, so need to figure how I can incorporate this over the weekends. I also lost a bit of weight, though not the 1 kg I was hoping for. I missed taking my diabetes medication one time, should not do this again. Also food choices were not the best, so need to work on that too. I also started meditating this week, and could do that twice this week, which is a plus for me.

Writing: Not bad, managed to post almost every day, especially in my other blog. I need to work more on posting here!

All in all, a not-too-bad start to 2015. If my life continues in this vein, life’s gonna look good by the end of the year.

Meditation….Bringing the mind home

Posted on January 8, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

One of my New Year resolutions was to learn to mediate and I tried doing that on Tuesday night just before I went to bed. I quickly Googled ‘how to meditate‘ and looked up this site. It looked quite easy to me – sit quietly in a place for 2 minutes and concentrate on your breathing.

Meditation has lots of benefits I learnt – physical mental and spiritual. You can go to the Art of Living site here, here and here for more information on meditation and its benefits, but my favorites are:

Meditation removes accumulated stress from your body and prevents new stress
Lowers blood pressure, anxiety attacks, decreases tension-related problems, improves mood, behavior, energy levels and the immune system
Increases creativity, happiness and intuition. You gain clarity and shapens your mind which also grants peace to your mind.
Lastly meditation makes you aware that your inner attitude determines your happiness!

Well, I set my phone alarm for 5 minutes and tried to concentrate on my breathing. Along with that, I tried to focus on an image – usually for meditation, you focus on OM, but I decided to focus on the image of my favourite God – the idol of Lord Ganesh as Siddhi Vinayak at the Siddhi Vinayak temple in Mumbai. It worked for about 3 minutes, when my concentration broke and I peeked at the timer to see the amount of time left.

Going to try it again tonight, maybe start at 3 minutes and work my way up. Maybe see if there any meditation apps I could use? I am also using the Clear app on my phone to remind me to do it – I’ve set a three times a week target, but my real target will be eventually to do it daily.

I’ll come back and report maybe halfway down the year if this has made any difference to my life, but I slept well last night – so much that when S was dropping me to work, I was closing my eyes and dozing off….

2015 Life Goals

Posted on January 1, 2015 by memoriesandsuch

Displaying image.png Another tradition I have is to put down my goals for the new year on Jan 1^st year. Now whether or not I follow through it is debatable….

This year I want to be my breakthrough year with no Resolutions, instead what I want to do is have Life Goals for 2015. These are more like goal posts of my life and I want to steer my life towards them. Resolutions seems something everyone says they will do on Jan 1 and promptly breaks it on Jan 02^nd!

So without any much ado, here are my Life Goals for 2015

Use the treadmill for a minimum of 30 minutes for a minimum of 6 days a week
Eat healthily with minimum junk food – no foraging biscuits in the office either!
Lose a minimum of 10% of my body weight as on 1^st Jan (which shall remain a secret here, but let’s just say that I do need to lose 10 20 kgs to reach my ideal BMI range). With this 10%, I still will be overweight, but slightly better than where I am today
Get my 3 monthly HBA1c count to between 5 and 6
Work with BB & GG to help them get good PSLE scores and get admissions into the schools of their choice.
Start working on revamping my resume. Talk to some resume experts and rework it. Start applying for jobs with the new resume in 2015 Q4, even if it’s where I am currently working in.
Take time for myself. Complete atleast 5 courses in Coursera – I have already signed up for 3 courses, which start sometime in March/April 2015, so this is one goal I should be able to reach easily.
Try to meditate once a week, increasing it to a 2-3 times by the time the year end rolls by.
Try one new hobby – something I always to try, but never had the courage/time/pick your excuse to do…
And the most important one – atleast here – write more often – minimum three times a week on both blogs!

There! A fairly big list of things to complete in 2015. Hopefully, now that I have put it down on paper, I will be forced to do it.

What do you think? Do it think they are doable? Am I trying too many things at the same time? Too ambitious?

Memories and Such

Memories of a very ordinary life

Category Archives: Life