Pittsburgh_Patrika_October_2015

The Pittsburgh Patrika, Vol, 21, No. 1, October 2015
Pranaam, India!
By Jeremy Levy
e-mail: jlevy@pitt.edu
Jeremy Levy is the director of Pittsburgh Quantum Institute and a Distinguished Professor
in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Pittsburgh. Here he
reminisces about his wedding to his Indian bride, twenty-five years ago in Patna, India, and
talks about some changes that have engulfed Indians in India between then and now.
Twenty-five years ago, almost to the day, my fiancée Chandralekha
and I, along with my parents, brother and a few friends, stepped
off of a plane in Patna, the capital city of Bihar in northern India. Days
later, we were married. Our mid-June wedding
coincided precisely with the arrival of the monsoon
in Patna. The steady downpour wreaked havoc on
the logistics of the essential marriage functions. But
in India, it is a good omen for weddings. I sat on
a canopy-protected stage, sipping Thums Up soda,
waiting for my bride to arrive. Meanwhile, foreign
bacteria marched unopposed through my intestines,
Pacheese sal pehle on the
Wedding Day.
setting up shop. Auto rickshaws ambled along the
narrow, flooded streets of Patna, succumbing every
now and then to tub-deep potholes.
Before coming to India, I knew nothing about Hindu weddings or dayto-day
customs. And yet, I was anything but a tourist. There are two basic
ways to greet and say farewell to someone. If it is a friend of the family
or a stranger, you hold your hands, hath jhoad ke, clasping gently the
two palms facing each other, and say namaste. But if it’s a relative you
say pranam. And if the relative is very senior to you, you should (to be
safe) do pear chew-ke pranam, an added
measure of respect. Basically, you dive at
their feet. It wasn’t long before I mastered
the basic dive sequence. I had no idea
who anyone was, so I dove at everyone:
parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles,
neighbors, cousins, maidservants.
That’s the mechanics of respect. But
how is that really respectful? The concept
Aaj, with their Princeton-bound son.
of true respect quickly disintegrates when you try to pick it up and mentally
isolate it. Ultimately, you just know when someone is giving you
respect or not. I realized that respect isn’t really about the diving motion
at all. It is a state of mind.
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