'Asian Cilla Black' brings arranged marriages to TV

By Jerome Taylor
Published: The Independent 30 October 2007

Ask someone in a happy arranged marriage why they let their parents pick their spouse and they often repeat the saying: "In the West, you marry the one you love. In the East, we love the one we marry". You learn to love the person you marry, they argue, because the people who selected them chose so well. Parents and close relatives are the people who know you better than anyone else, so why not let them choose something as important as a life partner?
Now the BBC hopes to bring this philosophy into our homes and hearts with a new primetime matchmaking show to help lonesome singles find the partner of their dreams using the principles of a modern Asian arranged marriage.
Arrange Me A Marriage which airs next month on BBC2 is hosted by Aneela Rahman, a thirty-something British Pakistani who is being heralded as the "Asian Cilla Black".
With such high divorce rates in the UK, Ms Rahman believes the key to successfully finding a life partner is through the principles of a modern arranged marriage in which compatibility is crucial. Only by matching up class, education, family background, life goals and earnings will it ultimately succeed.
She argues her 15 years of marriage to her husband Maqsood, with whom she has two children, is living proof that arranged marriages work and, in a society where more and more people live alone unhappily, a dose of traditional Asian marital medicine may be exactly what we need.
She said: "Most Asians are introduced to potential partners by the people who know them best – their family and friends – and the suitors are selected in a very matter-of-fact way based on who might be most compatible."
"My approach to arranging marriages is pragmatic, focusing on compatibility – looking at shared goals, background, values, education, earning potential but love and attraction is also very important. I don't advocate suitors getting together if they aren't attracted to each other. But I believe that there is a strong chance of making a successful marriage if as many of these key factors as possible are taken into account."
A pilot of the programme aired earlier this year. It received such positive reviews that BBC executives were persuaded to commission a five-part series. The first episode features Lexi Proud, a 33-year-old who moved, aged 16, from the North-east to London and has a string of broken relationships. Aneela believes that Lexi's pattern of failed relationships is down to dating people outside of her class – something with which Lexi strongly disagrees – and so Aneela sets about finding her someone more compatible, using her family as chief advisers.
Geeta Vastavasrivastava, the UK head of the global matrimonial website Shaadi.com, said: "Because an arranged marriage is supported by a family from the start, when you go through a bad patch, you still have the support of the two families that brought that marriage about in the first place. It's something very specific to the Asian culture."
She believes that many people in Britain have trouble with the idea of an arranged marriage because they confuse it with a forced marriage. Geeta said: "The vast majority of arranged marriages are not forced in any way. You can often spend a few months with someone the family has chosen and at the end of it just say no. Ninety per cent of the people I know have decided on their own whether they like the person enough to marry them."
But many young Asians increasingly believe that the concept of an arranged marriage is incompatible with living in the modern world and point to increasing divorce rates among Asian couples.
Aninditha Basu, a 33-year-old lawyer currently fighting off suitors put forward by her family, believes that arranged marriages are simply too artificial for modern times.
She said: "In an arranged marriage both prospective partners only show their best side so you don't get to know the real person. In a love match, you already know everything there is to know about your partner before you take the plunge. For me it's not good enough to hope that love comes once the marriage has taken place. That's too big a risk to take."

http://news.independent.co.uk/media/article3109882.ece

India's star marriage: Bollywood's golden wedding

(Photo taken from the film Umrao Jaan)

Today's lavish wedding of Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan has generated levels of excitement in India the likes of Liz Hurley can only dream of. By Jerome Taylor

Published 20 April 2007, The Independent.

The couple themselves would make the ultimate Hollywood love story. One is a beautiful, green-eyed starlet who conquered hearts across the world with her stunning silver-screen looks, the other is a muscled, gritty heartthrob and heir to one of the most popular acting dynasties in the world. And today they finally tie the knot after finding love on a movie set.
But this is not the story of Brangelina or the latest Hollywood duet. This the story of "Abhiash", Bollywood's hottest couple, and the wedding that India has been waiting for with a level of excitement that could, perhaps, only be rivalled by a cricket World Cup final pitting India against Pakistan.
When Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan announced their engagement in January after months of speculation, it was clear that their wedding was only going to be one thing: the Wedding of the Century.
Rai, a former Miss World and one of the few Indian film stars to have successfully crossed over into Western cinema (thanks to the British director Gurinder Chadha's Bride and Prejudice), is Bollywood's leading lady. Her husband-to-be is the son of Amitabh Bachchan, the godfather of Bollywood who has been known to churn out more than 60 films a year and is quite possibly India's most popular film star of all time.
When Britain's paparazzi descended in their droves last month on the western desert city of Jodhpur for the second wedding ceremony of Elizabeth Hurley and her textile mogul husband, Arun Nayar, India looked on somewhat bemused.
As one Indian journalist put it: "Ultimately very few people in India had ever heard of Liz Hurley let alone cared that she was getting married. Many Western journalists were asking locals in Jodhpur, 'What do you think of Liz Hurley?' and most of them replied 'Who's Liz Hurley?'. As far as Indians are concerned there is only one wedding this year, that of Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan."
That would be putting it mildly. Both actors have remained two of the most popular Bollywood stars in recent years; an impressive feat in the highly fickle world of Bollywood where a single bad film or politically careless remark can result in this month's hottest star being replaced by the latest beautiful hopefuls who arrive in Mumbai, the home of Bollywood, in their thousands each year.
Born into a devout Hindu family in the southern port town of Mangalore, Rai first made headlines after winning the Miss World contest in 1994. Her vibrant jade-green eyes were an unusual asset for someone from a southern Indian state and she soon began turning heads in Tamil-language films before being snapped up by Bollywood.
Unusually for a Bollywood actress, many of whom remain unknown outside India, Rai managed to make an impact on Western cinema after winning over international critics in the lavishly produced epic Devdas, which was given a special screening at Cannes in 2005. Her starring role in the British film Bride and Prejudice, Chadha's popular interpretation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, made her a household name and her latest Western film, Provoked, which tells the tale of a battered British Asian housewife forced to kill her abusive husband, has received handsome reviews.
Her groom, who, despite his family heritage, initially found it difficult breaking into Bollywood, is now one of the highest-paid male stars in India, feted by both the press and hordes of screaming female fans. It was perhaps inevitable therefore that Bollywood's two hottest stars would meet on a film set and fall in love.
A marriage between two Bollywood stars is big news in India at the best of time but the number of column inches dedicated to "Abhiash's" wedding preparations has been remarkable even by the standards of film star-obsessed India.
Over the past three months, the country's numerous movie magazines, gossip columns, celebrity websites and chat forums have been talking about little else. Publicists have found it difficult to garner interest in their forthcoming releases, tantrum-prone starlets have been sidelined by the celebrity reporters who are determined above all to get the ultimate scoop on just one thing: "Abhiash" and their marriage. No detail of the wedding preparations - be it the colour of the tablecloths or the truth of a rumour that the groom will wear a golden crown once favoured by Bengali princes - has been too small for the magazines to detail in all its lurid glory. No snippet of information is too irrelevant to be billed as an exclusive scoop. Rumours of upset mother-in-laws, jilted ex-lovers and wedding day jitters fill the celebrity pages, usually with little evidence to back them up.
But such overwhelming press attention has resulted in the Rai and Bachchan families going to extraordinary lengths to keep the details about their wedding as secret as possible and the Bachchan family residence has been turned into a veritable fortress. All around the string of bungalows which are situated on a prime spot of the exclusive Juhu Beach area of Mumbai, constructors have erected a giant wooden wall to keep fans and, more importantly, the long lenses of the paparazzi out.
Guests have reportedly been asked to keep completely silent about the arrangements and more than 500 police officers are on duty to keep fans at bay.
Not that the incredible security around the Bachchan family bungalow will deter the most hardened fans. Throughout the week, stories of die-hard fans desperate to do something that will get them the must-have invite have peppered the Indian newspapers.
Prakash Pandey, a small-time confectioner from Kanpur in the state of Uttar Pradesh, whose shop briefly appeared in one of Abhishek Bachchan's films two years ago, recently announced he would travel to Mumbai and personally deliver an enormous tray of wedding sweets.
"When Abhishek came two years ago to Kanpur for a film shoot, he came to my shop and called me uncle," Pandey told reporters before boarding a train. "He is my nephew. I will be allowed into the Bachchan house as I have been there before."
A 17-year-old girl from the state of Bihar, meanwhile, has been working day and night for more than a month to finish a red embroidered sari that she wants to present to her idol, Rai, as a gift. Asked whether she thought she could get round security, Joyti Kumari simply replied: "I will try my best."
The contrast between the lives of these two fans and the idols they adore could hardly be greater - Bihar and Uttar Pradesh are two of the poorest states of India while Rai and Bachchan live the life of Mumbai royalty far removed from the slums and poverty around them - but they sum up how seriously India takes its film stars and how loved they are by their fans.
To the Indian population, the vast majority of whom live in the countryside, the cinema is often the one major source of entertainment and Bollywood stars, particularly those who play heroic roles, are given a virtually god-like status. Such popularity brings great political potential and many of Bollywood's greatest actors, including both Bachchan's parents, have dabbled to varying degrees of success in India's political system.
But unlike many Indian weddings, which often involve noisy and colourful street processions that bring the whole town out onto the streets in celebration, the wedding of Aishwarya and Abhishek is set to be a decidedly private affair. Abhishek's octogenarian grandmother is seriously ill and the family have reportedly toned down the celebrations so that she can attend.
Nonetheless, no expense has been spared for the three-day ceremony which kicked off on Wednesday with a pre-marriage party featuring songs, dances and skits performed by close friends and will climax today in the actual Hindu ceremony that binds the couple together as man and wife.
"There are seven types of Hindu weddings, ranging from very simple ceremonies where the man and woman simply exchange rings to weddings involving extremely complicated religious rituals. This wedding is the latter," said Ramesh Kallidai, head of the Hindu Forum of Britain.
Both the bride and groom come from devout Hindu families. In the months leading to their official engagement, both the couple and their families were seen visiting a number of important Hindu temples and the relatives have reportedly visited numerous Vedic astrologers and soothsayers to find an auspicious date for the wedding ceremony. According to Mr Kallidai, they could hardly have picked a more suitable date.
"Starting from last night, the next few days are considered particularly auspicious days for making a new beginning so, naturally, there will be many weddings this weekend," he said.
"The reason for this is because, on this lunar day, the holy Ganges river descended from the heavenly planets to the earthly realm. Any activity begun today, be it a marriage, job or journey, will grow and prosper."

Fire and light: the Hindu wedding
Hindu weddings vary from the opulent ceremonies favoured by India's elite to village ceremonies for more than one couple, to cut down on costs.
Clothing, style and practices depend on caste and region, but the wedding itself has set rituals dating back 6,000 years.
Blessings are performed in the weeks leading up to the marriage. The day itself starts with the bridegroom and his family marching, accompanied by musicians and priests, to a covered canopy where the bride and her family awaits.
The father gives his daughter to the bridegroom, who is showered with petals by his bride while she circles him four times. The couple exchange garlands and sit down together under a wedding canopy.
Usually the bride's hands and feet are ornately decorated with henna. Aishwarya Rai has had the finest henna flown from the state of Rajasthan.
A Hindu wedding is essentially a fire sacrifice and under Indian law no Hindu marriage is complete without the presence of the sacred fire, Agni.
Sitting before the sacred fire, the bridegroom places red kumkum powder on his bride's forehead, ties a sacred thread to her and accepts her hands in a ritual known as Pani Grahanam. The marriage is completed by a ritual known as Saptapdi, where the newlyweds take seven holy steps around the fire, making sacred vows to each other with each step.
Those vows made in front of Agni are considered unbreakable and emphasise the importance of creating a loving and peaceful environment for the new couple and their children.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2465941.ece

Religious offering: Faith, hope - and Western vanity

(Photo: Jerome Taylor)

The practice of Hindu pilgrims shaving their heads has created a £3.7m business for a southern Indian temple that sells tons of hair to Westerners. Jerome Taylor reports from Tirumala, Andhra Pradesh

Published: 16 December 2006, The Independent.

Dressed in her best yellow sari Mahibha Basu laughs nervously and threads her long, dark hair through her fingers as she sits on a stool awaiting her turn to see the barber. All around her, nimble-fingered professionals with razor-sharp blades are cutting hair with the kind of speed and precision that is only honed by years of practice. Ms Basu is not waiting for just another haircut. She is in one of Hinduism's holiest temples and is taking part in a pilgrimage of enormous religious significance.
Three minutes later she emerges into the crisp morning sunlight and makes her way to the main temple complex. With a bright red tikka mark adorning her forehead and coconut offerings in her hand, Ms Basu looks like any other Hindu pilgrim but with one startling difference. Her head has been completely shaved.
Her hair, meanwhile, has been carefully tied together and placed in a giant steel tub for storage. Within a matter of months Ms Basu's black tresses could be half a world away, adorning the head of any of the A-list celebrities in the West, from Paris Hilton to Victoria Beckham to Donatella Versace, who have embraced the fashion for hair extensions.
Ms Basu is just one of thousands of devotees who travel to Tirumala temple in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, one of Hinduism's most sacred religious sites and a place all Hindus are expected to visit at least once in their lifetime. Forty thousand pilgrims arrive every day to worship at the feet of Lord Venkateswara, a powerful avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu who, devotees believe, has the ability to grant the wish of any pilgrim who has made the journey to his temple. During major religious festivals the authorities prepare for up to 120,000 pilgrims to make the journey up the forest-clad mountain where the centuries-old Dravidian temple stands. So many people come to Tirumala, in fact, that many Indians claim the temple is the world's most popular pilgrimage site, even outstripping the Vatican and Mecca in the sheer numbers arriving on a daily basis.
Tirumala's draw is largely down to the awesome power of Lord Venkateswara. But what makes this particular temple stand out is the incredible number of people who have their heads shaved as part of the worshipping ritual in a tradition known as "tonsuring". Practised by Hindus for thousands of years, it symbolises the devotee's desire to overcome their ego, a fundamental teaching of the Hindu faith. But nowhere is tonsuring more enthusiastically practised than at Tirumala.
Ms Basu has travelled 1,500 miles from her native Bengal to ask the presiding deity to grant her most fervent wish. Four years ago she fell pregnant but miscarried shortly afterwards. "Now I am trying to get pregnant again," she says. "I have come here to ask the god to grant me and my husband a child."
In one of the many buildings surrounding the main complex, pilgrims queue in long snaking lines as they wait to see one of the temple's 600 barbers. Working in shifts around the clock and using nothing but a sharp razor, water and immense skill they can cut off a pilgrim's hair in a matter of minutes.
The effect is astonishing. All around the temple thousands of bald devotees stand in groups, their laughter echoing off the walls as they joke and point at each other's new, unfamiliar look. Bald-headed children run between the multitude of hat wallahs that line the surrounding streets selling a vast array of baseball caps to protect heads from the baking sun.
For the authorities who run Tirumala, the enormous volume of hair produced each day has spawned a lucrative business courtesy of the Western world's newly discovered desire for human hair extensions - a fashion that has become hugely popular over the past couple of years thanks to the endorsement of celebrities. The temple has been able to cash in on an incredible growth in demand. Thomas Gold, whose Italian-based company Great Lengths International buys hair only from Tirumala, says the price of hair from the temple is now 10 times what it was five years ago.
"It's really amazing how the price has just shot up every year," he says from his company headquarters in Rome. "The Indians started understanding that this was a booming business and that we would still purchase at whatever price."
The industry has also benefited from a shift in the public's perception of hair extensions. "Up until five or six years ago," says Mr Gold, "it was unthinkable for a woman to say 'Look I'm wearing hair extensions'. Now women will positively show them off to their friends. The taboo has been abolished."
The global hair industry is now worth an estimated £160m and is growing by 25 to 30 per cent each year. Indian hair is particularly sought after because it is cheaper than European varieties and will not have been chemically treated or dyed. Moreover Chinese hair, which globally still makes up the majority of hair exports, is considered too coarse to make good hair extensions.
Over the course of a year, the temple auctions 90 tons of hair, providing revenue of around £3.7m which is then ploughed back into charitable causes, including a number of specialist hospitals. "The money from hair is significant but it isn't our main source of income," says the temple's executive officer, APVN Sarma. "Our primary source is donations but the income from hair is still very important."
The temple has an annual budget of £90m, making it one of the richest religious institutions in India and also one of the country's largest charities. Part of the reason why Tirumala is so popular with devotees and donors is the temple's long tradition of welcoming all visitors regardless of caste and religion. It is one of the few major Hindu temples that allows non-Hindus to enter the inner sanctum that holds the deity.
"There is no shrine in India where so many subdivisions of Hinduism recognise this as a holy place," says Mr Sarma. "We even have a number of Muslim and Christian devotees. It has always been a temple where other religions are recognised." But for the temple authorities, hair wholesalers and the thousands of low-income Indians employed in the country's hair trade, the popularity of hair extensions could not have come at a more opportune time. Two years ago the Indian hair market was on the verge of collapse thanks to a surprise religious ruling from an orthodox rabbi.
Until then Tirumala's main clients were not the exclusive hair salons of Mayfair and Rodeo Drive but the Jewish wig makers of Brooklyn who provide many orthodox women with sheitels to cover their hair. The business, much of which is run from New York, is a lucrative one with some of the costlier wigs selling for anything up to $4,000.
Indian hair was popular with sheitel makers for the same reasons it is now popular for hair extensions; it was cheaper than European hair but equally thick and glossy. But after travelling to Tirumala in 2004 a London-based Rabbi, Dayan Aharon Dovid Dunner, issued a decree arguing that sheitels made from Indian hair were not kosher because the hair came from an idolatrous ritual. Although Judaism follows no central religious authority and even though a majority of rabbis disagreed with Rabbi Dunner's ruling, the orthodox community obeyed the decree almost unanimously. From Brooklyn to Tel Aviv giant bonfires were erected as women burnt their Indian sheitels. "It was chaos," says one manufacturer who asked not to be named. "Overnight sales of Indian hair dried up as everyone frantically bought up European wigs. No one uses Indian hair now."
Hair wholesalers in India saw their market disappear over-night. Yet salvation came in the most unlikely form: the hair extension-loving celebrity, and soon the industry was booming again.
As the hair extension industry grows so do the question marks over where and how the hair in our salons came to be there. Stories have emerged of impoverished European women desperately selling hair that took them years to grow. Even worse, human rights groups have made accusations that much of China's hair comes from labour camps. But for those clients worried about the moral repercussions of buying human hair for their extensions, Indian temple hair has the added bonus of being one of the most ethical sources not only because the money goes to charity but also because the hair is given up wholly voluntarily.
It is a fact that has not gone unnoticed by those wishing to market temple hair to its full capacity. "There is nothing to hide about this beautiful business. It's a win-win situation for everyone," says Mr Gold, who feels more clients are starting to insist on ethically-sourced hair.
It is a wonderful irony that hair discarded by pilgrims in order to prove they can overcome their ego is then shipped and sold to Westerners looking to improve their physical appearance and self-confidence. The bizarre role reversal the hair goes through is not lost on the temple authorities. "People in this part of the world tonsure their hair to lose their pride," says Ramapulla Reddy, one of the temple's senior administrators. "On the other side of the world they do the opposite."
Even though the vast majority of devotees at Tirumala have little idea what lies in store for their hair, they seem unconcerned by the idea. "I don't care where the hair goes afterwards," laughs D Vasudevarao, a pilgrim who has been coming to Tirumala for 20 years. "What is most important to me is that I have left my ego outside the temple. What happens to the hair afterwards is immaterial."
For Ms Basu the idea that her hair might one day adorn someone else's head is a delightful surprise. "I think it's wonderful that my hair might be used in the West to make someone happy," she says. "Why not? I have no need for it."
ends.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2079344.ece

The kurinji blooms just once every 12 years. But are its days numbered?

(Photo: Roy Matthew)

By Jerome Taylor
Published: 27 September 2006

Far up in the Nilgiri hills, a vast expanse of grassland at the southern edge of India's Western Ghat mountain range, the verdant landscape is usually only interrupted by a flash of colour from tea plantation workers and their brilliant saris.
But once a decade the hills above the tea fields erupt in an explosion of blue and purple, thanks to the kurinji plant, a tiny flower that blossoms just once every 12 years and is found solely in the southern Western Ghats.
This year the kurinji is flowering across the Nilgiri hills in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, but its numbers are much reduced. Over-development in the region and the introduction of non-indigenous plant species have destroyed much of the kurinji's habitat - and environmental campaigners are concerned it may soon disappear altogether. In Kerala there are now just 14 square kilometres of suitable grassland left on which kurinji can grow.
"When we first started work in 1982 you could see the kurinji all over the Nilgiris as it blossomed," said G Rajkumar, a bank employee from Thiruvananthapuram who now leads a campaign to help protect the flower. "Now those areas have been massively reduced. Even though it only grows above 5,000ft, it is ultimately people that are responsible for its demise."
The fragile ecosystem of the Nilgiri hills has found itself under pressure as tourism booms and commercial plantations seek to cash in on India's burgeoning economy by planting numerous species of non-indigenous trees, especially acacia, pine and eucalyptus trees. As demand for cash crops grow, so do the plantations.
During the summer, hordes of local and foreign tourists journey up the mountain passes to the cool hill stations that dot the Western Ghats, escaping the oppressive heat in the plains below and sampling the only tea grown in south India. The result is a major water shortage which, environmentalists warn, threatens to damage the kurinji's natural habitat.
As the flowers blossom this summer, the worst fears of environmentalists appear to have come true.
The loss of the kurinji would not only be a huge blow to science but also to south India's long cultural heritage, which lends the plant near mythical status.
"It's impossible to digest that fact and accept it," John Britto, a local botanist and a Jesuit priest, told the Los Angeles Times this week. "As a person of this land, a culture, it would be a terrible loss. We are wedded to the soil, the land, to the plants, and that link between man and nature is getting lost. That's irreparable."
Although Western botanists first recorded the flower blossoming in 1858, the indigenous hill tribes of the Nilgiri have long venerated the little blue flower in their local customs and folklore. One tribe, the Muduvar, use the kurinji's blossoming to help calculate their age.
Tamil poems dating back more than 2,000 years praise the karungal kurinji (literally "black-stemmed flower") and the honey made from bees that feed on its nectar. Hindu mythology records the god Murugan wearing a garland of the flowers at his wedding to a local girl.

ends.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article1761659.ece

http://kurinji.in/