In India, the current favourite line is that we need to stick to our roots and take lessons from our past. Our women are becoming too westernised. They want to choose their life-partners and all hell break loose. What can be more "western" than women trying to take the matters of their own sexuality in their own hands! Let's try to go back then. Although I surely realise these are dangerous times to write on these issues, but like Brecht said, what do we sing about if not the dark times, in the dark times. Well! He did not exactly say that. He asked us to keep singing. Here is my song bereft of the apparent music but who knows you may hear Bismillah playing Shehnai for I will talk of weddings (well! sort of) and the rules that guide it in these times. But let me start from Mahabharata and that too at the very beginning. The Adiparwa when Pandu is talking to Kunti to convince her to get other men to beget children: He says, “In the olden days, we hear,” he begins, “...