The two sides of Indian wedding ceremonies

In the past two weeks, I was in India attending my brother's wedding ceremony. As is usual with Indian weddings, the ceremony lasted for many days, in this case, five days. Many family members came from the four corners of the country. It is one of those opportunities when people can meet, even after not seeing each other for decades. From my perspective, it was even more interesting as it was the first time that I participated in such an event.

Each one of the five days could separated into two parts: the first part where the rituals and formalities happen and later after a dinner, the second part starts which consists mainly in a party where all dance and enjoy together. It is no surprise that the latter is the fun part, whereas the former is frankly very boring. Even though in western societies such (boring) rituals still happen, they basically consist of one ceremony where the couple exchange rings.
There is almost no more symbolism in such ceremony. In an Indian wedding, on the other hand, the symbolism and protocols involved are far greater.

In the first day, the engagement ceremony is performed and is organized by the bride's family. In such ceremony, the couple, seeming to adopt the western tradition, exchanges rings and later all the elders (and only the elders) give presents to the couple. Until then nothing really
shocking, except for the fact that from this day on the couple is no allowed to see each other until the wedding ceremony takes place. Moreover, there are always many protocols to follow. For instance, the groom is necessarily the last to arrive and is always accompanied by the best man, in this case me. For another example, when we were leaving the hotel for the engagement party, it was the duty of the groom's father to accompany all his brother-in-laws, for some mysterious reason!

In the second day, a ceremony called tikka happens which this time is organized by the groom's family. There some praying is done in the presence of the bride's family, but not the bride herself since the couple cannot meet yet. As with religious ceremonies in the west, Indian pujas are a waste of time. Even worst than in a church since the priest speaks most of the time in Sanskrit and therefore the public, at least me, has the faintest of what is going on. After this ceremony, the bride's family is supposed to give some gifts to some members of the groom's family, including to me.

The event in the third day was not actually part of the wedding ceremony, but was rather aimed to Andrea and me. It was in fact our (second) engagement party, but the real reason was mostly to present Andrea to the family. As I requested a very informal ceremony, nothing religious happened. (Thank god.) We just had the typical couple dance, and then the party started.

The wedding ceremony was performed in the fourth day. The symbolism is very clear. The groom is supposed to go to the bride's home and "bring" her to the groom's house. This is of course symbolic for saying that the bride belongs no longer to her original family, but to the groom's, which in my opinion is quite unfortunate symbolism. It just maintains the clan culture among families for which you can frequently hear in the language used by Indians. For example, one can often hear things like: "You are not of the family." or "He is family.", etc. Such type of language is almost not present anymore in cultures like in the German or Brazilian cultures. During the evening, there are at least four religious moments, some where the groom and also the bride visit temples and other are performed by the priest at the dinner reception. The most important one lasted more than 3 hours which went until 5 in the morning. Again, no one is really interested since the priest is just saying what seems to be nonsense in Sanskrit.

There are, however, fun moments in between the boring religious rituals. For instance, the groom arrives the bride's home on a chariot, but during the journey the whole groom's family is dancing and having fun. For another example, there is an interesting play with the sisters of the bride, called salis (in fact, her girl cousins/sisters). The groom's brothers (in fact, his boy cousins/brother) have to bargain with the salis in order to enter the bride's house. This involves paying some money to them. In my brother's wedding, however, it would have been more fun when the salis knew how to play better. They bsaically did not seem to realize that this is just a game and that they should quickly lower their demands. So the game got boring because we were trying all possible ways to reduced the entrance price and they just kept
asking for high amounts (they insisted for almost 20 minutes on the price of 51 thousand rupees, equivalent to thousand Euros!). A similar game repeats itself with the groom's shoes. At some point, we are supposed to hide his shoes, but in such a way that the salis must be able to find them. Once found, we are again supposed to bargain for recovering the shoes, so that the groom can step out of the party with them. Once again, the salis did not seem to realize that this is just a game. So at the end it was unfortunately not that much fun.

In the fifth day, it was basically a reception without no formalities (Ufa!). It was really nice since everyone were much more relaxed as the all logistics were over. Andrea and I had to go directly from the reception to the airport since our plane was scheduled early in the morning.

Although there are a lots of formalities and protocols in an Indian wedding, much has changed since the times of my parents for example. Then the couple did not have any saying, but rather their parents would basically force them to marry. On the hand, now couples decide whether or not they like each other and want to marry. Things like the caste system does not seem to be no longer relevant. For instance, from the Indian customs, my brother's wife, that comes from the "superior" caste of professors, would not be allowed to marry my brother that comes from the "inferior" caste of warriors.

My final impression is that Indian weddings lose a lot of time in the first part with the religious rituals, when they should maximize the second part with the party. It is almost certain that Andrea and I will attempt to do so. Nevertheless, it was really interesting to participate in such event, but more interesting to spend time with all my cousins and family folks.

Americans got it Right

One of my previous posts comments on several issues, such as environmental care, that I think the Americans got it wrong. In some sense, those were not that hard to point out after eight years of Bush and the very conservative policies that his government supported. It takes a bit more time, therefore, for an outsider to see or feel the bright side of American society. For me it took about six months. It happened while I was attending the memorial for Amir Pnueli in New York City. Since I went there alone and I did not know many people, I found myself one evening searching for a restaurant to eat alone. Ordering a table for only one person is kind of depressing, so it took me a bit of time to find the courage to enter in a NY restaurant where all tables are usually full of people. After walking for some time, I entered a sympathetic, friendly, French restaurant and ordered for a table. I ordered a glass of wine and while I was browsing the menu, a woman, at her mid 40s, stands on front of me and asks whether I am Indian. I respond that in fact I am Brazilian, and after some more small talk, she invites me to sit on her table together with some of her friends. It happens that she just came back from India and she loved it. However, when I joined them, I was facing a French woman that loved Brazil! She goes very often there and went to places that are still in my to-do list, such as Parati. We also shared our experiences in Fernando de Noronha, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, etc. In summary, what seemed to be a lost and boring evening turned out to be a very enjoyable one.

Being approached by a complete stranger in any European country is something that is almost impossible. When she approached me, I felt that I was in Brazil where people do these kind of things. For instance, in Brazil, it is not very seldom that while one is waiting in a queue, one becomes the "best" friend of the following person. Definitely, this is an aspect that Americans got right. They are much more open to personal contact than Europeans.

The faith of a rationalist

In the past days I have been going through some of the texts of Bertrand Russel. Among them, I would like to suggest you his paper entitled "Why I am not a Christian and the faith of a rationalist". It outlines in a well-written way the main arguments for why religion and, in particular, Christianity are flawed and should not be taken as seriously as one does. Besides the well-known arguments against religion, such as the lack of evidence supporting god, he makes the following two points which are most interesting:

1) If you think that there is a difference between right and wrong, then you are faced with the following problem: if you think that this distinction was designed by god, then it is meaningless to say that god is good because he himself designed the rules for saying that something is good. Now, if you think that god is good, then you must admit that the rules defining right and wrong come from somewhere else. So, why do you need god?

2) Was Christ as described in the Gospels a wise man? In some aspects yes, but in many others no. There were much wiser men than Christ, for instance, Bertrand Russel himself is much wiser than Christ. Chirst for instance believed on hell. To believe on the idea that someone will be punished with the worst tortures for the rest of time just because he/she disagrees with some values does not seem to be very wise.

From my personal background, I could pose a similar question w.r.t. Krishna: was Krishna a wise man? It does not seem wise to believe that a person's duty (dharma) comes from the fact that he/she was born within a social class. In particular, Krishna tells Arjuna, the warrior prince that was in doubt to fight against his kin, that he should fight because he is a warrior, that is his duty. In that sense, Buddha seems a bit better since at least he acknowledges the problems of the caste system. Moreover, to my knowledge, Krishna did not say anything about the fact that the war would involve millions of "innocent" soldiers that served both armies.

Americans got it wrong

Dear all,

It has been a while (almost one and half years) since my last post. Much has changed in my life in the meantime. I graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, got engaged, and now I am a postdoctorate researcher at UPENN, Philadelphia, in the US, since last November.

After five years in Europe, I find the life in the US very different from the European one. The Americans have a very different set of values than the Europeans. One big difference, in my opinion, is that Americans do not know how to live. Let me give you a simple example: I often ask the graduate students at UPENN about their plans for Summer break, and all of them tell me about how they are searching for internships in companies or trying to find out some more extra classes to take. If I asked the same question to an European, most of them would tell me about their big plans of going to the beach or hiking, etc. In France, for instance, the whole country stops in August, that is, everyone is on vacations. When I tell this to any American, they tell me how impossible it would be even to think on asking his/her boss for a month leave.

Another aspect that differs very much from the European values is on environmental issues. This is specially shocking when coming from Germany which is one of the countries that best takes care of the environment. In the US it is really the opposite. There is basically no care for issues like recycling, saving energy or water, mass transportation, etc. For instance, the lights in my department stay on the whole time, even in weekends! The same happens in the building where I live. There is not even a timer that automatically turns off the lights after some time. Recycling in the US is also ridiculous. My building is one of the few that do something, but compared to any German home, it is really nothing. They only recycle old newspapers and magazines. They do not even have a slot for tin cans!

However, the worst aspect is not even the two above, but rather how they treat the poor. It is sad to see that in the richest and most powerful country in the world, there are people without teeth that cannot formulate correctly one sentence. You find people like that very often on the streets here in Philadelphia. They do not have access to hospitals, schools, basically nothing, while the upper class shows off their BMWs and big cars around. Given this situation, it is not hard to see how one can easily manipulate these fragile people with nationalistic propaganda or religious brainwashing. They are against issues which would clearly benefit them directly, such as health care. This contrasts with the situation in Europe: whenever there is any attempt to remove rights of, for example, the French people, they rise up. They are not easily manipulated because they are treated much better by the French society, although they do have their problems.

After five months in the US, I am really glad to discover that this is not where I want to be for the rest of my life, at least not if things continue like this. Europe may have its problems, e.g., xenophoby, but overall their values are much more compatible my values.

Too much of information, but not too much of wisdom!

Today I saw an interesting interview with Ralph Nader, among other things, a lawyer, a political activist, and an independent candidate in the American presidential campaign. In the interview, Nader questions that, with the outcome and development of internet, people are overwhelmed with tons of information and do not have enough time to process it into wisdom. 

Nader continues and explains what is the chain used to process senseless bits of information to a more deeper understanding of the world: 

                Information -> Knowledge -> Judgment -> Experience -> Wisdom.

First, one must know what is the information, that would be knowledge. Then with this knowledge one must think critically about it, that is, judge the knowledge, and then, base his/her actions on this judgement leading to experience. Finally, only after he/she has experimented and seen the outcomes of his/her actions, he/she transforms pieces of information into wisdom. 

Engineers vs Logicians

This past week I was attending a summer school about software verification, called VTSA, in Saarbruecken. There were many interesting lectures and I could learn much about model checkers and SAT solvers, giving me very good impression of the event.

From a more proof-theoretic and automated deduction perspective, it was interesting to see what is researched in model checking and in SAT solvers. They seem to do more engineering oriented research, trying to have good implementations and algorithms to overcome the state space explosion when modeling always more complicated softwares; while we try to work more in expressiveness of the logic and postpone, as much as possible, to implement specific algorithms that can handle some specific cases. So there is a contrasting approach in the communities: the theorem proving employes more logicians, while the model checking community employes more engineers.

However, I was very impressed on how far the engineers/model checkers/SAT solvers can go by "hacking" logic to be efficient. They seem to have many more applications cases than the automated theorem proving community, and seem to attract more and more the attention of industries. The negative aspect is that the size of software models seems to be growing much faster than the computational power of computers, what implies that more "hacks" would be necessary to obtain efficient implementations, and with these "hacks" more mysterious these systems would be. Moreover, the properties that we would like to be proved also tend to be more expressive, and hence may not be possible to check them by using model checkers at all. Therefore, I believe that in the future there will be an increasing demand for theorem provers, and to meet this demand, we must research more logic. This does not mean, however, that model checkers will not be used any longer. I believe that for simple properties, model checkers will continue to be used in larger scale, as proving with model checkers is in general easier than with theorem provers.

Modern Person?

Recently, Andrea brought to my attention a very curious way of Indians classifying a person as a modern person, what is not at all common in the western world. For an Indian, modern people are those that do not wear traditional Indian clothes, and that are more flexible towards traditions, such as dating or flerting, enjoying the nightlife, and other more "western" habits. As Indian society has not yet freed itself from religious/traditional habits, specially those traditions related to relationships before marriage and women suffrage, this classification is normal in India, but long forgotten in western cultures, where these movements happened one or two generations ago. That was indeed a very curious observation of cultural differences affecting language.