On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Chetan Nagendra <che...@pobox.com> wrote:
> .it's always been >> meaningless mumbo-jumbo to me. >> > > > I wouldn't be so dismissive, and the 'mumbo-jumbo' is a specialty of > orthodox sects such as the Madhva Brahmins. > I'm not being dismissive..what I said was, it *was* always meaningless to ME. If they are meaningful to others, that's as it should be (obviously, they are meaningless to my husband who cannot even remember the mantras in their entirety.) In fact, before my daughter's wedding, I spent a year learning all the mantras that were to be recited, and their meanings and symbolic significance. I then sent a series of emails to the 30 Americans who came down for the wedding, explaing each part of the wedding to them. It tickled me a lot when two Punjabi friends from Delhi asked about the significance of the swing ceremony and two cousins living on Vashon Island explained it to them! The conclusion I came to was that they were relevant to a time when a woman had (quite literally...only one of the mantras is uttered by the woman out of the hundreds in the wedding rituals) nothing to say in the wedding....and when she was, truly, a belonging, "handed" (pANi grahaNa) from father to husband. Deepa.
