Dummies Guide to Tam-Brahm Weddings

(No offense meant to anyone in particular. If you think any point here refers to you, Don't abuse me but instead get in touch with your inner self and try to accept the fact that you are a dummy and you need to seek professional counsel before attending weddings)

Ah, a tam-brahm wedding. Now this happens to be a lively congregation of the cream of society.

The cream of society unfortunately is for the most part a highly phony gathering of people who run out of conversation fast and run out of genuineness faster. Dealing with a tam-brahm wedding is a totally different experience because you really don’t know how to start dealing with it, or whether you should start dealing with it at all. Let’s get down to the dirty stuff –

1. “Epdi Irukka/irukkel?”

Let’s face it folks, it’s more of a rhetorical question, because even if you are dying of some deadly and dangerous disease which is eating away your brain or sanity, you are going to reply “I’m fine, how are you?” So next time, if someone asks how you are doing, just reply –
“Unfortunately I have contracted a disease known as bored-by-the-same-crappy-question-which-doesn’t-need-an-answer. It is fatal and you are just making it worse. So get out before you become the cause of my death!”

The rather knotty problem is after asking how that person is, you have no idea how to proceed with the conversation, because you either know so little about the person, or they are a generation above you and you might be afraid that they are going to start giving you unwarranted advice on how not to keep a French beard because it makes you look like a hardcore Muslim terrorist. Hell old man/lady, it’s not a fuzzy fungal growth beneath my chin which is going to reach out and eat you, or develop a character of its own and plant a bomb. Maybe I should allow my beard to speak – “My name is VBK’s beard, and I am not a terrorist’s property!” So leave it alone! (Although I do really wish I had a tentacle beard like Davy Jones in Pirates... If only to freak people out with all the tentacle movement)

2. “Eppo vandhel? Journey comfortable ah? Jet-lag irukka?”
These questions are reserved for people falling in these two categories –
a) They are pretty old and you have no idea what to ask this person; and sometimes it becomes embarrassing when you ask journey comfortable ah because it’ll turn out that the person you are asking had moved into the city ages back! And so, the conversation goes like this:
“Journey comfortable ah?”
“Enna journey? Naan inga dhaan 5 years ah irukken!”
Oh dear, here comes the uncomfortable pause. You try to recover.
“Err, illa, veetlendhu mandapam ku journey epdi, traffic jaasthi ah?”
“Enna pa solre, en veedu to mandapam just 5 minutes distance!”
At this point, the best thing would be to draw inspiration from the 100 m sprint athletes and pretty much get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

b) The second category of people is the NRI families flooding the wedding, flocking in from flights. Inevitably, most of the heads of the families are software engineers with bulging bellies and insane software skills; their bellies have been conditioned because their bratty kids ran toy trucks over them, thinking them to be interesting terrain. These are the people with jet lag; they want to make it general knowledge that they spent thousands of dollars to fly here and sleep off during the day; Their biological clocks are all haywire and before they get accustomed to the day/night patterns here, it’s time to leave. Well, don’t just stop by asking if the journey was comfortable, because this will inadvertently trigger the response "It was good". Instead, ask your teenage cousin how hot the air hostess was, or ask your athai if she caught your athimber ogling at the pretty woman next to him. Though this may initially trigger a sense of Huh? What! How dare he! it is sure to get better and people might actually start accepting the fact that you are not the regular epdi irukkel kind of conversationalist.

3. “Payyan 12th standard ah? Nalla padikkanum. Endha engineering college la setha porelu?”

As it turns out, majority of the Tam-Brahm people are total geeks who are rarely into any other profession other than engineering. A few stray leaves on the family tree might actually manage to do something else other than engineering, but most people don’t want to cut out the benefits of going to ‘America’ as it if fondly called. Hence the family is riddled with ‘America maaplais’- cool dudes who spend their lives learning to cook Tam-Brahm food in America and looking into their monitors all the darned time while accumulating alarmingly increasing waistlines; and Iyer girls who learn classical music or dance and pursue that while doing their engineering.. After all, when the time comes to get married, the parents have to say, “She is an engineer and has this many concerts in this many sabhas to her credit!”

What is with the Tam-Brahm obsession with engineering and going to the US? Why can’t people just let their kids do what they want!

4. “Saaptaacha?”

This is, in my opinion, the crowning glory of stupidity. Food is one of the most integral parts of any wedding, and people rarely, almost never miss the chance to go and kottify as soon as possible. Unless you want to exhibit the characteristics of a selfless martyr, in which case you don’t go into the saapadu pandhi. Smarter still, you can go to the pandhi and claim not to have eaten yet – even then people think you are a martyr. Or else, just say no and go for the eat for a second/third round; after all weddings are all about tantalizing the taste buds and tormenting the stomach into doing unimaginable amounts of digesting.


5. Maaplai/Maatuponnu vandaacha?
Oh hell, this one again. Maybe it's just a tradition, but unless you have been giving amazing business to the ophthalmologist, you ought to be able to see that the maaplai or maatuponnu came in the morning itself and has been sitting there like a rock, a permanent arc writ on his/her face (smile)and of course, there are always these pesky kids on stage. Alleged to add to the cuteness quotient of the stage probably. Just note this point in all weddings - there will invariably be some kid who comes on stage and tries to act cute with the maaplai or the ponnu. Why?!

6. Happa, ippo enakku route clear!
This completes the list of cliched lines at weddings. The younger sibling usually says these lines indicating that he can now get married. Someone ought to go tell him that if he is going to go about belting crappy lines of this sort, no one would want to be in his line at all, whether it's clear or otherwise

Please do add your own, after all we are on a mission to eradicate dumbness :-)