The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : At sixes and sevens

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Jul 07, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

At sixes and sevens

Alladi Jayasri

Find out what
07/07/07 has to offer those in the marriage market

BANGALORE: The seventh day, of the seventh month, of the seventh year of the 21st Century. Auspicious, jinxed or just plain hype for sundry astrologers and soothsayers to cash in on credulous clients’ need for reassurance that heaven is here and now. And heed our advice if you please?

Its auspicious enough for Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria to choose this day to tie the knot with her boyfriend, the basketball star Tony Parker, though, of course, the superstition is entirely all the couple’s own pet fetish, counting on going to the Seventh Heaven entirely on their own steam. No, Cassandra is talking of dire consequences if they didn’t wed on that day though.

What does 07/07/07 has to offer the retailers of dreams, the wholesalers in the marriage market? Ringing cash boxes as they laugh all the way to the bank and never mind the stitch in the sides?

Across the United States, Time magazine reports some couples’ wedding preparations include having seven bridesmaids, seven groomsmen and 7 p.m. receptions. In Las Vegas, that hot destination for quickie marriage and divorces, the Chapel of the Flowers will host 113 ceremonies from dawn to midnight. Over 3,000 couples have reportedly applied to get wed in the 40-odd chapels in Vegas.

Closer home, the sun is not likely to rise and set quietly this Saturday — the seventh day of the week, lest you forget. A certain section of the wired population is on tenterhooks to know the fate of that ultimate symbol of love, the Taj Mahal, which suddenly finds itself obliged to be in the list of the Seven Wonders of the World all over again.

Every seventh Indian is a self-styled numerologist (is that a legal word in the Oxford dictionary?) or has the ultimate guru of numbers at whose command the planets and stars in the Milky Way miraculously change their recalcitrant ways to make life easy for the seven incarnations. It surely must be a conspiracy to tweak the world every now and then, and say, hey here we are, revolving round the sun and making things nice for you, why don’t you pamper us just a wee bit?

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