The Sabarimala protests are a blot on the progressive state whose highest literacy has not translated to good education
Business Standard: From the time I can remember my grandmother, only one image of her comes to my mind – of a widow with a tonsured head, wrapped on top by a dull brown cotton saree worn in traditional style, a blank forehead without the usual red vermilion or ‘kumkum’, bare neck, empty ears and hands unadorned and shorn off all jewellery. Her ankles and feet were bare too – without the traditional anklets or silver rings worn on the toes of both feet – the symbol of married women.
A very vivid story of my grandmother is etched in my memory. I had gone to Melkote, the idyllic temple town near Mysore – where she lived with one of her sons, my maternal uncle – during my school summer holidays from Gorur, where I studied in the local government Kannada medium school.
In those days, a favourite vacation was being taken to your mother’s birth place to be with your grandmother, carefree and pampered. I must have been eight or nine. My older sister was by my side. I’m not sure what triggered this poignant episode that my grandmother recounted, but it was heart rending. Her eyes had welled up in tears, and with dreamy eyes into her distant past she narrated this event.
She was married off as a child-bride of 13 to a boy – also young, just 16 – who was studying to be a Sanskrit pundit and training to become a purohit (priest) in Melkote, a Srivaishnavite pilgrim centre founded by Ramanuja a thousand years ago. When she was in her late thirties her husband took ill and died. She had three children – two boys and a girl, my mother. They were all in their teens and in school.|Read Source: BS
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