The wedding edition
Hello from my home in Helsinki! This is NordLetter #91, a weekly newsletter on living and walking in Finland. Each week I share some of the interesting things I found on the web.
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I like going to weddings. I like the food - obviously, but I also like looking at the actual wedding - the rituals, the decorations, the different characters involved in turning it into a success, dancing in the baarat and so on.
We are a group of five close friends (brothers?). I have known them from the first year of college (and one from the second year). One theory I have about college friendships being the ones that last, is because we all grow together during this time - we get more responsibilities, we grow.
I have grown with these people.
Four of us are already married. The last remaining friend got married on 5th Feb.
It was a 2 states situation - the girl from Karnataka, the boy from Uttarakhand. It was also a destination wedding of sorts - the boy’s family (11 of them) travelled from Delhi to Sirsi, plus the three of us and two more people.
Sarthak and I had took a flight from Delhi to Bangalore and then drove from Bangalore to Sirsi with Pankaj.
At the T3 terminal there is a nice bronze statue of a man in the different poses of the surya-namaskar. Not a new installation, mind you. I had seen it earlier as well, the difference this time around was that I have been doing surya-namaskars for the last three years now. So there was a little bit of recognition and fondness there.
The drive to Sirsi was good for most of the time. The last 60 odd kilometres were a mess. The entire section was under construction. We were running late and it had gotten dark by the time we got to this section. All the content in our stomach got thoroughly churned.
We reached Sirsi at twelve in the night. Saurabh was waiting for us at the parking place, holding the door, making sure we had a place to park the car. We did, picked up our stuff and went to sleep.
The thing about South Indian weddings is that they start early (we had to be ready by 7:40) and end by lunch time.
I could not sleep. The thing that I had been dreading for the entire trip happened now, at the worst opportune time. My stomach had gone rogue. I kept turning in place, waking up my friends a couple of times. Finally, around 04:30 I managed to sleep. At 06:30 I was up.
The benefit of it being a day wedding was lost on me. I was as sleepless as I would be in a night wedding.
The wedding was held at a hall in a temple complex. This was a five minute drive from where we were staying. Sirsi is a small town. We had brought a speaker with us per the groom’s request. We took it out, put up ‘Azeemo shaan shehenshah’ as our friend got down from his room. We danced a bit to some Garhwali songs, finishing up with Lungi dance - the three of us were in lungis after all.
We had a similar smaller duration dance at the venue. But the girl’s father came and requested us to enter and we did. I remember dancing for two hours in front of Uchit’s in-laws, ditto for Sarthak’s wedding. My friends danced at my wedding for two hours. This was different here. Overall, the wedding went very smoothly.
We entered the venue after that. It had seats arranged in two columns with the stage at the head. After some rituals involving the groom we were told - breakfast awaits. The meal room had many rows of tables and chairs, with the people sitting on two adjacent rows facing each other. The breakfast was served on a banana leaf. Men and mostly women went around carrying idlis, vadas, sambhar, and chutneys. It was delicious. It reminded me of how bhoj used to happen in my village back in the day. There was a certain charm in that. Sitting on the ground, and having people serve you. If it was your function, you wanted to be the one serving. It was a thing.
The marriage started in earnest after that. I did not understand what was being said, everything was in Kannada. I caught translations from time-to-time, as the bride’s side explained certain things. But I could draw parallels between how things happen on our side. How some things were the same and some different.
Before the varmala ceremony, for example, they had kept a white cloth between the bride and the groom as the priest chanted some mantras. I was standing there waiting for the cloth to drop and capture the photo of the groom looking at the bride.
This was not standard in our weddings, but in the north, all of ours weddings have been Punjabified in that way. We have all picked things from the Punjabi weddings. Which is good in certain ways and tiring in others.
There was none of that here. The pressure of pre-choreographed dance steps was thankfully absent.
Some other rituals followed. The bride and the groom put rings on the other’s fingers. The groom put those rings in the fingers of her feet. I was asked to do this in our wedding. It was a fun thing that drew many comments from Prerna’s side. None of that here. Then they walked over some pan leaves kept on the floor. This must have some significance. In my wedding Prerna had to knock over some soil figurines which also had a significance.
Finally, Saurabh took a ring and put sindoor in the bride’s maang (parting of hair). This too was different from how we did things in my wedding. We put a lot of sindoor in Bihar, from the nose up to the maang.
Then, they moved from the stage to the ground and the wedding continued around fire. I took a chair and sat in front of the pair. I was a little surprised that I got the view. Once I did, I did not move from my place. Whenever the pair caught my eye, I kept reminding them to smile. The pictures remain through out your lives after all.
Saurabh would lose his smile from time to time. The bride was smiling though.
After the wedding was done, we left for lunch in the same room. We ate on the banana leaf again. One after the other, the servers kept adding items to the plate. Finally, as the rice came, we were ready to eat.
It was again a sumptuous meal. I love South Indian food. Rasam warms your soul in a way nothing else does. I enjoyed also the sweet dish.
They received guests on stage after that. Which was not something that made sense to me. The bride’s makeup was a bit off thanks to all the sindoor. But then, sometimes weddings in the north get delayed because so many people want to take pictures. Make of that what you will.
We took the same bus from Sirsi to the airport in Hubbaali. It was through a different road which was not broken. For some reason no shops were open, so we could only stop for tea after reaching Hubbaali.
The airport at Hubbaali is small, though work is ongoing to expand it. I heard somewhere that there are six daily flights here - all operated by Indigo. I did not mind waiting as the rest of the people went through the security check. I would not be able to do this at Delhi airport for example.
I watched Rebel Moon on my way back. It is a bad movie. I could see what the director/writer wanted to do, what the story beats were, and that’s never a good sign. I finished the second part after reaching home and it was worse than the first part. After watching it, I realised how difficult it is to tell a good story even in these bombastic action genre movies.
/five things to share
1. Anthropic didn’t want us to know that they were destroying millions of books to feed their software - Lithub
Project Panama capitalized on that loophole. Anthropic spent a bundle at libraries, online secondhand stores, and used bookstores like The Strand to build out a massive library—the Post’s article includes images of huge warehouses filled with books. Anthropic then hired “an experienced document scanning services vendor to convert from 500,000 to two million books over a six-month period,” according to the proposal sent out to vendors.
Two things here.
- Who names these things? Project Panama?
- This just seems so bad. It makes it visceral in a way scraping off the web isn’t. They literally rip apart the books after they’re done scanning. I’m sure they are not alone in this.
2. Six Selfish Reasons to Have Kids by Kevin Kelly
Children are entertaining, much better than any other streaming option you might pay for. The questions they ask, their antics, watching them play, witnessing or being the recipient of their creativity, sometimes on a daily basis, is the best streaming there is. Their creativity is often inspiring. They can be creative in negative ways, too, but in all ways they will not be boring, and they are right there in your presence.
3. Claude Sonnet 5 Is Imminent — And It Could Be a Generation Ahead of Google by Alex Morgan
Industry insiders point to cost-efficiency as a likely centerpiece. Inference expenses may be reduced by half compared to current market leaders—a shift that could reshape how organizations integrate and scale AI technologies. For many, these savings are just as crucial as technical prowess, since lower costs can unlock AI access for businesses and individuals who once found it unattainable.
What came out was Opus 4.6 instead. And GPT 5.2.
4. Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now by Simon Willison
Moltbook is Facebook for your Molt (one of the previous names for OpenClaw assistants).
It’s a social network where digital assistants can talk to each other.
I can hear you rolling your eyes! But bear with me.
The Facebook, Zuck wants to build.
Moltbook went from a cool place to a cybersecurity hellhole pretty fast. But that’s to be expected for anything to do with AI. It moves so damn fast.
5. SpaceX wants to put 1 million solar-powered data centers into orbit by Terrence O’Brien
SpaceX filed a request with the FCC on Friday seeking approval to put a constellation of 1 million data center satellites into orbit. While the FCC is unlikely to approve a network that expansive, SpaceX’s strategy has been to request approval for unrealistically large numbers of satellites as a starting point for negotiations.
This feels wrong. Like we are closing the doors on exploration. Like we will be stuck on a worsening planet.
If you enjoyed reading this, and know someone else who might, please consider forwarding this to them. It would help this grow and make me happy. 😄
Until next week.