Jan 20, 2011

We keep talking about how the world is small and how one thing leads to another, and so on. Paths fork and diverge and in some cases snakes swallow their own tales!

The other day I was showing my wife photographs that my friend had posted on Facebook of his daughter’s wedding. Needless to say, the pictures were spectacular, everything looked festive like things do in proper Indian weddings of the ‘Monsoon’ kind.

The journey also served as a great discussion point for cultural aspects and practices. In one of those pictures women were holding ‘dandiya’ sticks in their hands. My wife wanted to know what those were.

So we went around looking on Youtube for a good video on the folk dance. One would have thought it to be an easy task – but I could not find any that actually illustrated the idea of dandiya, its rhythm and the percussive effect of the sticks anywhere.

We also talked about Navratri in the course of discussing the dance and when it was most practiced. Later, I wanted to research the festival ‘Navratri’ some more, since my memories were playing tricks on me. I found a decent article on Wikipedia. That is where I also found text on the nine names of Shakti. There were a couple of names in there that I often call my daughter, always endearingly, even if in mock anger. I promptly mailed those to my daughter, and put them in my previous blog post.

For some time now I have been trying to get my personal blog to show up on Facebook. The link used to work before, but had stopped doing so for a while. I was playing around with that issue when suddenly the blog and Facebook connected. All of a sudden the post on Shakti was posted on my wall even though I had no specific intention of doing so.

My friend, whose photograph started it all, without knowing commented about the blog. In a strange way, it became another example of a small world, where even though paths fork strangely, sometimes they come back to the origin.