Mahila Sangeet - Wedding Part 2

The 2nd day of the wedding was the Mahila Sangeet. Sangeets are done differently in different parts of the country and within different families. It's predominately done in the North. For this one, the family of the bride meet at her house. A lot of men skip out on this function. Some Sangeets are only for women, but most nowadays are for anyone. At Jaya's house, women gathered in the downstairs room and sang songs (some men were outside or around this area). Some are religious songs but a lot are folk songs too. They sing, clap and play the drum. In the upstairs room, Jaya was getting Mehindi (henna) done on her arms and legs.

So what do you do if you have your hands covered in Mehendi and your hungry? Your friends feed you :) The bride gets fed a lot during her wedding time. It was HOT this night. You can tell we're all really hot!

Here is the finished product! Her left arm's designs represent her husband and the right arm's designs represent her. It's pretty cool how it tells a story. If you look closely you can see pictures of her and Deepansh on her arms and the god Ganesh.

This is what her legs looked like :)

It was a fun night hanging out and watching that amazing artwork! The guys that do Mehendi are quite talented!

Cooking!

Cooking is sooo much harder here. THis is how you "puree" vegetables when you don't have a blender or food processor (or power). Some people have those things, but most people don't. This is my friend Gita. She's mashing up some onions. It's a marble slab that's not polished and they use a big rounded rock and just roll/mash! It's cool!!

Protesting

There's some political stuff going on in our city (and now the country) right now. People are peacefully fighting against corruption. It's been very interesting to follow. Tonight there was some protesting in our neighborhood. Here are some more protesting pictures. There will probably be more protesting to come... we'll see what happens!

Funny Things - Random :)

Here's a few random funny things ;) One thing that drives a lot of people crazy is honking! There are things that drive me crazy (like people urinating on the sidewalks - yuck!) but thankfully honking is not one of them because we hear it pretty much 24/7. We saw this poster the other day (below) and thought it was funny... BUT not as funny as the Hindi poster. The Hindi poster pretty much said that 'Honking is bad for your health' - haha ! Horns are actually a pretty necessary part of driving here. You don't really look behind you when you drive (most people either don't use their side mirrors, don't have side mirrors, or just have them folded in). When you drive, you just drive forward and you honk at the person in front of you to let them know that you're there - simple right? Sure, it's a little noisy, but you never have to look behind you :) If you go to that company's website it says: "Have patience at the traffic signals, let the signal t...

..SouthAsiaRocks..

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