Of Sisterly Love (and Disgust)

(Day 37 of 112)

It’s Raksha Bandhan in another fortnight. Usually mum would buy all the rakhis and post/send them with people to the cousins living in other cities as well as have them ready for the few cousins I do have in Bombay. All we (my sister and i) had to do was get up and ready in time on that day, look pretty (duh!) and collect the moolah from our unfortunately outnumbered brothers.

But this year all this changes. I’m married now. This means that the rakhis that I tie (or are tied for me by a stand-in) have to be sent in by me. This involves (a) finding out where one gets rakhis. (b) figuring out which of those places you’ve heard of before and have a good chance of locating on your own. (c) calculating which is the closest to your house and thus can be reached easily. (d) actually going there to buy the rakhis.

All the above steps done, I finally got down to buying the rakhis today. And 10 mins later I wanted to shoot someone. Rows and rows and tables full of rakhis and not one, not one I repeat was the kind you would want to spend any amount of money on. All the rakhis, apart from being highly overpriced, were the kind that could probably be seen from a mile away. No they weren’t big in size – they were shiny. In the gaudy kind of way. Not content with sticking ugly coloured stones on sarees and other female apparel, now they start doing it to rakhis too! And so the choice was getting a rakhi with multicoloured stones strung together with a horribly clashing coloured thread or getting a rakhi with those false diamond like thingies sandwiched between something that resembled gold coloured plastic triangles, all held together by some wool like thread - the kind that itches and leaves a stain on your wrist.

Are you effing kidding me? A100 bucks for an ugly piece of plastic on an uglier piece of thread? And don’t even get me started on the rakhis which have religious iconography on them or cartoons! I mean who wants Shin Chan on a rakhi? Don’t tell me. I know the answer is bratty little boys. I was being rhetorical.

And then to make more money out of gullible (and desperate sisters) they use marketing strategies which are or should be part of B-school curriculum. What they do is hang rakhis on a piece of string across the shop and sell them for Rs. 10. The same rakhis they also put in tiny plastic boxes (or ugly paper boxes with plastic windows) and sell them for Rs. 30. WTF! And it’s not even like the rakhi is anything but multicoloured thread twisted together and dipped in glitter. Sheesh!

So for the record, I’m officially disgusted. I have now come to the conclusion that all rakhis from this point onwards shall be homemade. Just like they used to be when we were in school and had to make rakhis for art and craft. It’s back to basics time now. Sisterly love is not going to be bought in a shop anymore. It shall all be homemade and stuck with liberal doses of fevicol!

Ps: After an hours search I did manage to find some rakhis I could buy without cringing and since I had to send them with someone going out of town this very evening, I had no choice but to buy them. Oh the agony and pain. But for next year it’s homemade rakhis definitely!