Scalded from within

First of all, I am very happy to report that I have officially completed my first cooking exercise successfully. One of my friends (thanks L) had suggested that it would be a great idea if I were to bake a cake for C. You know it has that touch of personal effort that would hopefully make her feel special. And she assured me that it was not that hard a thing. So, I took her advice and went to the grocery story and brought generous supplies. I also enlisted the help of two of my other friends who were kind enough to render it. We drew up a few diagrams( from the best shape of the cake to the coordinates of the letters of her name), brain-stormed the whole idea and we argued passionately about the color of frosting and the font of the letters. We then came up with a plan.The plan was to bake two cakes sequentially-one as the primary weapon and the other as the backup. So there we were. Three clueless guys (some more than others) tryong to raise the dough so that one of us would fall in love. Brothers in aprons. With remarkable stealth, I was able to sneak in a few drops of love potion extracted straight from the oil fields of moi heart. Suffice it to say, everything went perfectly (to our surprise). C says she loved it and I blushed when she said it. Of course, she would not share her cake and so I had to go back and split the backup cake with my buddies. No complaints. It is all good.

Now, to other issues. Last time I mentioned one of my friends who had a bad experience in his love life. The poor guy had been married for a year and a half. An arranged marriage. Just what the book says. Two Sikh youth tied in Holy matrimony. Except that it was not a happy marriage. For whatever reasons, it did not work out. And during one of the arguments, she told him that she had actually never wanted to marry him because she never wanted to be with somebody with a turban and a beard and the only reason she did so was because her parents forced her to do it. My friend had a knife slice through his heart and his soul. He did not say another word and left the house. They have now been seperated for a year with a divorce in the works.

My friend is a strong guy and he has endured everything well. That is such a crappy way to end a marriage. I know when people fight, they say nasty things to each other to hurt the other even though they may not mean to do it. But then again, it was something that had been brewing inside of her for a long time and then when it came out, it did so with an explosion.

His story has only increased my disenchantment with arranged marriages. How can I be sure that the sweet looking girl that I will be marrying after knowing her for 30 seconds is not going to tell me two years into a marriage that she married me under pressure? There is no way to know that and that send shivers down my spine.

Marriage and religion, for Sikhs are intertwined in a complex nexus. More and more of us are rejecting others because of turbans and pagris blah blah blah with utter disregard to the real person within us. We are too caught up in issues that should not be given too much importance.
The whole thing makes me want to puke but I know that is not going to help anybody.

When I was baking the cake, we kept poking a knife through the cake to see if it was baked or not. I wish we could do the same thing with our religion coz although the cake was not scalded from within but I am afraid that we, are getting charred from inside out.