Generations!

Suddenly the choir changed the tempo and I just came back to the occasion. It was the marriage of my cousin sister and we all had assembled in the church to bless the occasion. The priest was chanting something in Syrian, which were like magic words for all of us. May be that was required for the marriage to happen… I don’t know… strange customs that nobody know, but has to happen for the ceremony to get over! Marriage, another strange event in one’s life, when the bride and the groom ask the public for permission to live together and bring their progeny to the crowd. If the crowd disagrees, then the offspring is orphaned by the society. Interesting to look at humanly traits that sometimes go beyond logic, even though we are considered the brilliant among living things. Another aspect of this is that, if the society abandons a bride and groom from their desire, then they can avail a legal way of getting married. So the rule supports it, but the rulers do not. Ha! Private rules for the bride and the groom!

The priest was still chanting something and blessing the bride, when my thoughts ran a few years back, when we were all kids and were playing some funny games during the mid summer vacation, camped in grandma’s house. Its hardly a decade ago and we were all pretty small kids and were all equals. The past has moved to present, a generation has gone under the earth and I see, those kids have grown up now, married and have their kids playing on their laps. My grandma and her generation are all forgotten now and we all live in the present, with our own daily complexities of life, trying to nurture the future generation. Its all obvious, yet baffling sometimes. Why do I exist here? "Just" to nurture a future generation?

Looking around in the church, I found a photo of Jesus, slanting from the wall. The belief in rebirth is something that has implications in all religions, I think. But looking at it from another perspective, isn’t it that our progenies are our previous generations reborn? Like Richard Dawkins story of 'the selfish gene' goes, isn’t it that the basic materials that built the new generation, built from the older ones? If I think of it, I can see myself as a leaf of a gigantic tree, where there must exist an unknown link from me to the first living thing on this planet. If that link is broken somewhere, then I cannot exist now! I might be the rebirth of someone of the older generation, but I don’t know. It can also happen that many me-s exist now. Abstraction aids ignorance and hides the implementation!

Seeing that I was looking around and not listening to the prayers, I noticed a teasing look from the vicar, who had almost completed the prayers required for knot tie-ing ceremony to begin. Its something we copied from the Hindu culture. It’s something I really liked and which makes me proud of the secularism prevailing in this country. We might be of any culture or religion, but we all have a foundation, which makes us different from the rest of the world. That’s something cool to think about!

I was getting a bit bored with the things going on around me, which I don’t quite understand. All that mattered was that "very moment", the moment when that marriage took place, which marked the beginning of a new generation. Every moment has its work to do, which it does and vanishes somewhere. So is the moment when I am writing this and you are reading this. But interestingly, if you look at it, the moment, which created these words on moments, will always carry with it the presence of this very moment!

The marriage was all over and we all moved to the reception at the auditorium. From somewhere outside I came to hear this old pessimistic hindi film song: “Aanewaala pal jaane waala hey, Ho sake tho ismein zindagi bithaalo, pal yeh tho jaane walaa hey” (the moment to arrive has to leave, so if possible try to live in this moment, since this moment has to depart soon)!