Dear home: Letters from an NRB The Aesthetics of wedding: putting relationship above consumption By Dev Nath Pathak   It was a break from the constant stream of news reports on corruption in Indian Politics and its likely remedies. It was a break from the dominant cultural forms and formats where every urge to seek fresh alternatives only leads to a dead end. It was a desire to seek a new source of sources of enchantment in the world that is exceedingly disenchanting. It was simply a way to reaffirm our faith in the very possibility of rethinking our ways of relating. This was in the... 

Dear home: Letters from an NRB Shaadi@Farm house:Poverty of taste in metropolitan weddings  By Dev Nath Pathak   Everybody loves a shaadi. A truism! Indeed. There is more to it. To complicate it further, it is not just about a man wedding a woman. Another truism! Of course, it is much more than that; it’s about forging proximity between two kinship groups (minimum); as it is said in common parlance, it brings two families in an affinal kin-lock. So far so good- thanks to the basics of anthropology as well as common sense. But then, the Shaadi that we are eyewitnesses of, and often-invited...