Thicker than blood

Someone quite rightly said that you don’t get to choose your relatives but then you do get to choose your friends.. I guess that God just let us choose the best! I’m not sure how many have been lucky with friends but I should say that I am one fortunate person who has been surrounded by so many loved ones at times when I needed them most that today I feel I can easily attribute a lot of what I am to them..

There are times when you feel like you should be left alone and you are surrounded by ‘them’ and they don’t let you to sit and think, you just wish that they’d just all disappear so that you could sit in corner and lick your wounds in private, but then on a later day you realise that your friends had actually tried to take your mind away from the problem, had tried to fill your thoughts with a little bit of sunshine so that they could see the smile back up on your face..

There are times when you’ve just wanted to talk and felt that the world was not treating you fairly. You just needed to tell someone that ‘It is not just fair!’ as though you’d just discovered the secret of living and then you dial the number of an old friend and pour it all out.

I’m glad there are friends, God knows how dreary life would have been without them.. So let’s toast a drink to them!! Cheers Amigos!

The 'true' stroy of Valentines Day

I just got this hilarious forward from Joe and I thought it ought to be shared...

In spite of what you have been told by everyone, especially the propagandist English media, the truth is that Valentine's Day originated hundreds of years ago, in India, and to top it all, in Narendrabhai's Gujarat!

It is a well known fact that Gujarati men, specially the Patels, (used to?) mistreat and disrespect their wives. One fine day – it happened to be the 14th day of February – one brave Mrs. Patel, having had enough of "torture" from her husband, finally chose to rebel against the system and thrashed her husband up with a velan, the rolling pin that is used to make chapattis. Yes, the same velan with which she made chapattis for him. Only, this time, instead of the dough, it was the husband who was flattened.

This was a momentous occasion for all Gujarati women and the revolt soon spread like wild fire, with thousands of housewives beating up their husbands with the velan. It was a watershed event in the history of love.

Soon, the "chapatti-ed" husbands from Anand to Amdavad, and all of the Patel men-folk, quickly learnt that their women armed with velans were truly a force, and started behaving more respectfully with their wives.

Thereafter, to commemorate that eventful day, on 14th February every year, the womenfolk of Gujarat would beat up their husbands with the velan and the men had to display the supreme joy of submitting to the will of the women they loved.

February 14^th became – as it remains even today – too much of an ordeal for the men and the most awaited day for the women. The wise among the men decided to use Gandhigiri in true Gujarati style to lose the battle and win the war. Soon the men started making offerings of flowers and sweets and gifts to please their 'patni devi's and bought their mercy at a price. And thus began the tradition of velan time.

As Gujarat fell under the influence of Western culture, and the Patels began to settle from Durban to Trinidad, the ritual and the celebrations (or the ordeal?) soon spread through out the British commonwealth, and then to the western countries that had trade relations with the colonies.

In course of time, velan time, got anglicized to 'Velantine' and then to 'Valentine'. As you know, today it is celebrated world over as Valentine's Day, and as people who are proud of 'Indian culture', it is imperative that we celebrate it in the original Indian way, and not in the corrupt westernized and commercial way.