The Golden Couple - Sri Halasyam and Smt Chellammal
In America, couples celebrating Golden Jubilee of their wedding anniversary may be lucky to get greetings from the President of USA and similarly in countries like Canada, Australia etc.
In UK the Queen from the Buckingham palace may be too happy to greet a couple celebrating their 60th, 65th or 70th and beyond wedding anniversaries. The authorities in India have no time or scheme for greeting such couples and as such the nation is busy with pros and cons of Section 377 about which newsprint and cyberspace is carrying enough cargo.
In India, such golden jubilee celebrations are invariably a quite affair with the couple going to a place of worship and eating a meal with near and dear.
One such couple, Sri Halasyam and Smt Chellammal presently at Madurai Tamilnadu who got married on Sunday 12 July 1959 gave a kick start to the Golden Jubilee celebrations on 12 July 2009 by going in the motor cycle to the famous Meenakshi Temple.
Their son Dr Viswanatha Prabhu and Daughter in Law Dr Vidhya Prabhu at Madurai had arranged special garlands for the golden couple. With traditional Nadaswaram music being played on the audio player, the golden couple had a delicious meal lovingly worked out by their son and daughter in law.
For this couple, fifty years back, the wedding was a noisy affair but the golden jubilee celebration was indeed a quite affair. They got married in 1959 at Uttamarkoil near Tiruchirapalli in Tamilnadu India. Uttamarkoil is famous for the temple which has all three gods Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva in one complex and that gives the rare staus to this once upon time village which is slowly becoming more and more urbane in recent times.
There were many more dear ones for the golden couple but they were all no where near, as they were far away in different parts of India such as Pilani (Rajasthan), Goa, Mumbai and Chennai. Many more are further spread across the globe from Australia through Malaysia to America.
As they day progressed, the golden couple continued to receive phone calls, emails, smses from friends and relatives all over both to greet and seek blessings on this rare occasion.
Halasyam and Chellammal firmly believe that an anniversary is a time to celebrate the joys of today, the memories of yesterday, and the hopes of tomorrow.
When you hear this golden couple saying that our wedding was many years ago but the celebration continues to this day, you get inspired and the nation and society can be assured that the institution of marriage is in safe hands.
