Family is Everything

When you marry in India (and usually your marriage is arranged for you), you don’t just marry a person. You marry that person’s entire family. The groom’s sister even places a toe ring on the bride’s foot to seal the marriage (and if there is no sister, they‘ll come up with a cousin or family friend). We didn’t get to experience an Indian wedding, but we had the good fortune during our stay in India to see little snippets of rich family life in action.

In Chennai on the very first day of our visit, we went to the home of an entire extended family centered around two brothers and their sister. About 15 people of their extended family took the day off work or school to host our group of 25 people from our ship, and they all dressed up in their best traditional clothing.

They had drawn a good luck symbol on the sidewalk to welcome us to the house, and brought us in through their front room, which was wall-to-wall shrines to Ganesh (the god with the elephant head), and other Hindu Gods. Then all 40 of us, with shoes removed, crammed into one room of their small, meticulously clean home and sat down on chairs, floor, bed, etc. They prepared fruit and something like the Indian version of Chex party mix for us to eat, explained their clothing and jewelry (nice bling!) and told us about family customs and religion. The grandmother sang in traditional Indian style for us -- quite beautifully.

I don’t know if there are any kinder, more warm-hearted people on the planet; they acted like it was a total honor for a group of strangers to descend on their home, eat their snacks, and take picture after picture. It was very humbling to have total strangers open their home to us in this very personal way. These folks have a family foundation to promote traditional Southern Indian culture, and they had friends at the local newspaper who came to write an article about our visit. We’ve been checking their website, where they hoped to post a link to the newspaper article. Their website address is http://www.srimylaporetrio.in/