mogha mull
Just finished reading Sujatha’s essay velinaattu mogham konda ilaignargalukku... Thanks to Lazy Geek for sharing it with me.
One of my distant relatives once asked me where I work. When I told him, he asked ‘And how are your chances of going abroad?’. Give me a break!
The irresistible craving for sophistication and man’s eternal tryst with his ego to which he ends up meekly succumbing more often than not, is the root of all velinaattu mogham. Relationships and the sensitive emotions that relationships render upon us is not just ‘an’ aspect of life, but ‘the’ pathway that provides a direction for our living. The sense of belonging and the sense of security that emanate from these sensitive bonds is something hard to notice in velinaadu.
As the writer candidly notes, higher education for the guy (oh! my son is studying in US) and getting married to an NRI for the girl (oh! my daughter is married and settled in US) is where the major chunk of this mogham lies. At times, the neighborhood gossip of their ‘brainy’ son studying abroad or their daughter settled in foreign married to a wealthy intelligent (‘foreign’ automatically translates to ‘intelligence’ for some strange reason) boy is more important than the boy being ‘her’ choice of a guy. And if you don’t go abroad, you are just another ol’ swine spending his life marching between the delirious streets of a dusty South Indian suburb, who goes to the Kodaikkanal hills for his honeymoon and wonders how beautiful God’s creation is.
The beauty of togetherness, the tranquility of an emotional bond goes begging caught in the audaciously luxurious lifestyles of velinaadu. I stand by the writer when he says ‘I don’t prevent anyone from going, but just want them to understand the cost they pay’. I would say a part of this responsibility for making one understand lies with the parents, in channeling their children with a balanced state of mind – modern thinking but traditional values! The former is prevalent, but the latter is running out fast in perilous attempts at emulating the velinaattu values.
Talking of velinaattu values, here’s a glimpse. Over a casual lunch, an American colleague of mine was talking to me about someone we had seen and we were trying to guess his age and experience. I said, ‘He might be in his mid-30s, so probably even married’. And my colleague spontaneously pipped in, ‘Yeah, at least once.’
I would rather drive a second hand car in the Saturday evening traffic in MG Road laughing my heart out with my wife and kids seated beside me, than earning big bucks in a far off land with each of us going different directions for work and juvenile merriment each in our own state-of-the-art cars.
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One of my distant relatives once asked me where I work. When I told him, he asked ‘And how are your chances of going abroad?’. Give me a break!
The irresistible craving for sophistication and man’s eternal tryst with his ego to which he ends up meekly succumbing more often than not, is the root of all velinaattu mogham. Relationships and the sensitive emotions that relationships render upon us is not just ‘an’ aspect of life, but ‘the’ pathway that provides a direction for our living. The sense of belonging and the sense of security that emanate from these sensitive bonds is something hard to notice in velinaadu.
As the writer candidly notes, higher education for the guy (oh! my son is studying in US) and getting married to an NRI for the girl (oh! my daughter is married and settled in US) is where the major chunk of this mogham lies. At times, the neighborhood gossip of their ‘brainy’ son studying abroad or their daughter settled in foreign married to a wealthy intelligent (‘foreign’ automatically translates to ‘intelligence’ for some strange reason) boy is more important than the boy being ‘her’ choice of a guy. And if you don’t go abroad, you are just another ol’ swine spending his life marching between the delirious streets of a dusty South Indian suburb, who goes to the Kodaikkanal hills for his honeymoon and wonders how beautiful God’s creation is.
The beauty of togetherness, the tranquility of an emotional bond goes begging caught in the audaciously luxurious lifestyles of velinaadu. I stand by the writer when he says ‘I don’t prevent anyone from going, but just want them to understand the cost they pay’. I would say a part of this responsibility for making one understand lies with the parents, in channeling their children with a balanced state of mind – modern thinking but traditional values! The former is prevalent, but the latter is running out fast in perilous attempts at emulating the velinaattu values.
Talking of velinaattu values, here’s a glimpse. Over a casual lunch, an American colleague of mine was talking to me about someone we had seen and we were trying to guess his age and experience. I said, ‘He might be in his mid-30s, so probably even married’. And my colleague spontaneously pipped in, ‘Yeah, at least once.’
I would rather drive a second hand car in the Saturday evening traffic in MG Road laughing my heart out with my wife and kids seated beside me, than earning big bucks in a far off land with each of us going different directions for work and juvenile merriment each in our own state-of-the-art cars.