Wedding engagement of a kannadiga brahmin family

My close kannadiga brahmin buddy from college (Vellore Institute of Technology/VIT University), Giri Venkataramanan got engaged on a Sunday evening to a pretty Kannadiga brahmin girl. The location was Hotel Residency on G.N.Chetty Road in T.Nagar, Chennai.


This was the first Kannadiga brahmin wedding engagement that I had ever attended. Amit Kishore and I were present to view the traditional ceremony, which includes signing of names of bride and groom and their wedding date by their respective parents in a  holy log book (for lack of a better word). What followed next was a string of traditional rituals that included people from both sides of the family and dress changing events.

This was only a small gathering comprising mainly of immediate family members and close friends. Amit and I kept ourselves occupied with our roles of a videographer and a photographer respectively, which was apart from making Giri (the groom) smile :-). Once the traditions were complete and the dinner room was thrown open, both of us donned our foodie caps and set out to explore the food, which consisted of fruit salad, tossed up sweet corn soup, cabbage salad, spicy pineapple salad, papads, butter roti, naan, Paneer Butter Masala, Dal Makhani, Roasted Potatoes (urulai roast), Malai Kofta, Yennai Kathirikka (Oily Brinjal/Egg plant), Curd rice, Bisi Bele bath, pickles, gulab jamun and ice cream. After a detailed sample of the dinner menu, we came to the conclusion that dinner was truly delicious and paid our compliments to the chef. Post dinner, we chatted with Giri and his bride for a while before congratulating the group and taking our leave.


Net-net, a good-looking couple, a warm gathering, well organized and decorated event with delicious food!!!

To view the complete set of engagement photos, click the photo album below.

Giri's Engagement, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

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Kaminey - A different bollywood movie experience

It was Indian Independence day (August 15) and I was at Chennai with my college (Vellore Institute of Technology) friends when all of us decided to watch a movie. Thus began the last minute scramble of getting tickets for that evening. We wanted to get tickets for a good Tamil movie, but all theatres were sold out owing to the holiday weekend. After a lot of scramble and hunting, we decided to go for the only movie tickets we got, at the Woodlands theatre for the bollywood movie Kaminey. And, we bought these tickets in black :-)

Now, here I was going to see a movie whose review I had not read, whose plot I did not know and whose poster I had not seen. Keeping my fingers crossed, I went in with an open and un-opinionated mind.

The first half of the movie was a mystery. I did  not know what hit me coz I could not make head nor tail of the storyline. The only thing I could appreciate was the seriously good acting. To make matters worse, a baby nearby didn't allow me to sleep. Thankfully during the movie break, my friends who had read the review cared to explain the plot, which cleared some of the cobwebs in my head. The second half of the movie proved to be much better as the plot began to unfold and the story started to take shape. Net-net, I cursed my fate of having spent my money on a totally rubbish movie whose only saving grace was the good acting of Shahid Kapoor and Priyanka Chopra and that too in totally new roles for them. A very different movie experience for me!

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