Chronicles of an Arranged Marriage - The beginning

After a 6 month long hibernation, this is my first blog! the lazy soul that I am didn't feel like blogging any more. But, I am back now, as I have a reason and a very important topic to blog about :D
What have I been up to for last 6 months? nothing much I'd say. Not too many changes, leave alone change in work, neither my project that I work in, has changed in last 20 months :P. There were a lot of exciting moments though :D, not very surprisingly, they are all with the travel I've done. I went on a 10 day trip in August, covering the coastal line from east to west! We started from Chennai -> Madurai -> Courtallam -> KanyaKumari -> Tiruvananthapuram -> Cochin -> Bekal and finally Mangalore, it was one of those journeys I'd been waiting to make for a long time, it was an experience I'd cherish all my life :), then there was a 450km bike trip done in a single day, a trek to the magnificient Kumaraparvatha in the western ghats of Karnataka in November and finally a drive with friends to Pondicherry in December to wrap up the year 2009.
But, what I am about to blog here is about something that started and got going somewhere in between this period. I was in my hometown of Udupi when the whole conversation was centered about my Wedding! Yes.. WEDDING. I'd never given the topic of marriage a serious thought until then, although parents had been asking me about it for almost an year. Not that I've not wanted to marry, but I'd always felt until then that I wasn't ready for it. After all the brainstorming sessions from Parents, Family and friends, it really got me thinking and I felt, it was time that I found a woman to spend my life with and I thought it was going to be one hell of a task to find a person I'd like and want to spend rest of my life with and more importantly expect the same from that person plus an extra expectation that she'd bear me :).
I finally told my parents that I was ready for marriage and they could start searching for a suitable girl. So, it all started in the month of November. (To be cont'd)