Do we need weddings?

It was quite thrilling to get up in the morning in anticipation of hearing tamil in all it's glory. Having roped in my uncle to give us [VS, TSL and me] some tamil lessons, I was already making a wish list on all the things I wanted to cover.

The first morning my uncle [Mr. V Srinivasan] treated us to a lovely poem from kurunthogai. But that is a separate blog. To give us the background he talked about the main characters of the love poems - the hero, the heroine, the friend, the mother, the nurse - etc. It boggles my mind these poems from hundreds of years ago don't talk about great kings or great religious figures or even gods. But they talk about nameless, average people with their everyday emotions.

We digressed to the institution of marriage and my uncle commented on how the really ancient poems don't seem to give much importance to weddings. And then he proceeded to recite this -

"Poyyum Vazhuvum Thondriya Pinnar Aiyyar Yaathanar Karanam Enba"

பொய்யும் வழுவும் தோன்றிய் பின்னர் அய்யர் யாத்தனர் கரணம் என்ப

Here is an answer to a very twentieth century question why do we need an institution called matrimony - 'after lies and mistakes and deceit there were ministers and ceremonies'.

Silapathikaram

Was idly browsing through a copy of silapathikaram. The epic poem starts off with a beautiful prayer. Or perhaps praise or celebration would be a better translation than prayer. Ilangovadigal, the author for the benfit of those who have not heard of it, begins by praising the moon, the sun and the rain. He intelligently slides in some praise to the King as well, by comparing these to the various things that the king possesses. One thing that was interesting to me was the moon comes before the sun in his list. First it is the moon, then sun, then rain. I would have expected the sun to be the first.

The climate does have an influence in the language does it not? In my language, you'd rather not have a 'warm' welcome. A few cool words are a good thing. And if you had spent some time under the hot scorching tropical sun you'd know why. So maybe the sun was too harsh that day when our good old Ilango started his poem and the bright moon bringing some relief was a welcome sight?