The other day, I got an invite
from a cousin for the engagement ceremony of his son. As I was sharing the news
on the dinner table, my daughter asked me as to what was a ‘Nichayathartham’
ceremony. I explained to her – it is the
confirmation of a marriage, announced in the presence of all the relatives and
friends of both the parties. It is a kind of a commitment made in public that
none of the parties can go back on. In olden days, a societal approval was more
sacrosanct than a legal document. And hence a ceremonial engagement assumed
great importance in social life.
As I recall my childhood, my
grandmother and the other women of her age used to play a key role in arranging
marriages for boys and girls in the family and in their friends’ circle. Marriages
in the traditional Indian society, in those days, were typically arranged by
the elders in the family through their own network of friends. And that was the case across the diverse landscape
of the country – north to south and east to west. The canvas would usually be a
close circle of region, language, caste and sub–caste.
Blockchain today is the latest
buzzword in IT industry. Every business
is competing against the other to find a use case to deploy the Blockchain
technology. Also, every Industry leader and every CXO is singing hosannas for
this new kid on the block. Blockchain is
a large distributed ledger that is self-certifying, is not owned by anyone in
particular and is supposed to be incorruptible. It guarantees the validity of
every transaction with no scope for errors – be it omission or commission.
If my granny was alive today, I
am sure she would have loved to create a permissioned blockchain of all
Tamilian / Brahmin /Iyer /Thanjavur district / Asthashastram boys and girls
with their complete CVs. All her age-group acquaintances would have owned the
nodes, whichever part of the world they were living in. And all those marriage
alliances they would have fixed, at the click of a mouse, sitting on their cosy
rocking chairs. And there was no need
for confirming the marriage alliance over a social gathering as this technology
claims the highest degree of accountability.
I would have loved to see this
gizmo in my granny’s hands but would have faced one problem for sure. My wife’s
CV would not have been part of this blockchain but would have figured in
another blockchain containing Delhi / Bahawalpuri / Saraiki etc. And I am told,
they are yet to crack the inter-operability across different blockchains.
