Happy Tamizh New Year

Wishing you all a very happy Tamizh new year!

இனிய புத்தாண்டு நல் வாழ்த்துக்கள் !!

Thanks to the Natesan's for giving them "matching" dresses for their Birthday!

Today's dressing session brought back memories of me and my brother, when we were the same age!

Wait, if you are thinking.. "oh so cute. Sundar and his brother must have worn matching outfits as kids!", you are way off base. There is only some truth to it!

When we were kids, our family went through tough times because my dad who worked in the insurance business was going through a labor strike. He did not have many choices. It was either sit at the picket line and forego pay or be ostracized. He chose picket lines, and that meant no pay! So we moved out of our big rental house to a small asbestos roofed shed the entire year of my 3rd grade(3rd standard!).

Naturally, there were no new clothes and we would end up getting new school uniforms stiched for diwali and no new clothes on our birthday. Somehow our parents made us understand what we were going through. For the next two three years, they were making a slow comeback, and that meant identical clothes for the two boys!

They would take us to Bombay Dyeing shop in Luz Corner and buy the same cloth by the meter and invariably ask the question "how much for him and how much for the little guy?". My brother and me would protest, take my parents to opposite ends of the shop to pick different patterns but invariably economics would take over. For a long time I used to see those books on my dad's shelf which said "Macro Economics - by Taylor" and would think that the guy at Art Land Tailors in Luz corner wrote those books!

Same pattern, same clothes and worse for my brother, he would get my hand me downs, which meant he would end up wearing the same pattern for another year or two. The horror! For some reason the parents, the relatives and even family friends would think this was "cute". Hopefully we were really cute, and they weren't laughing behind our backs. The phase finally came to an end, when I went to high school and my brother was as tall as me and eventually became taller than me. He was probably praying every day for some miracle by which the matching outfit, hand me down horror would end and was glad that it did.

Today it was so different watching the two girls, so happy to be wearing the same dress. Guess that is one of those things where, girls are different from boys!

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