Lately, I am being invited with some persistence to Shashi Tharoor’s wedding. First, news channels stole the invitation card even before the ex-minister sent it and then flashed it on my television screen, telling me to be at Tharoor’s ancestral house in Elavanchery, Palakkad on 22 August for the nuptials. And just yesterday, there was the Mumbai tabloid MidDay with the card on its front page and a headline shouting ‘Shaadi Mein Zaroor Aana’. It is difficult to refuse in the face of such earnest solicitations, and yet I am not going. I am convinced that he must not marry. 

For long, I have vacillated on what my considered opinion should be on Tharoor marrying. It is true that the institution itself is becoming an outdated one the world over. But then, there’s also the fact that marriage means a legal obligation, a subtle form of coercion to stay together. On the 13th of this month, I finally took sides and what made me commit was the Supreme Court. It held in a judgment that if a man and woman have lived over a long period together, then “…there is a presumption of marriage between them…” 

Live-in relationships, therefore, have the sanction of law. But it has come without the burden of the partner’s deeds. If Rabri Devi’s savings account shows Rs 1,000 crore overnight, then Lalu is automatically suspect. If Tharoor was married to Sunanda Pushkar when her links to the Kochi IPL team became known, his goose would have been a lot more cooked. Whereas now a large majority thinks that he was wronged, there would have been little presumption of innocence. A live-in relationship is companionship with less responsibility and that is good for most men and especially politicians. 

Marriage also puts the relationship on a different moral plane. Cheating on a live-in partner is a crime many degrees lower than cheating on your husband or wife. And finally, while the Supreme Court judgment also covers rights over property of a live-in partner who has died, the case for splitting up the silver after a break-up is still ambiguous. If one can steal, cheat and cough up zilch on parting, why marry? Not that Tharoor will do any of this, but it is good advice every man worth his salt should heed.

In Allapuzha, Kerala, nine British students have been booked on the charge of disrespecting the Indian flag during the famous Nehru Trophy boat race. The students are enrolled in para-medical courses in Kerala. They were arrested for allegedly draping the national tricolour around the lower part of their body while cruising on a house boat at Punnamada Lake, where the race was taking place. President Pratibha Patil was chief guest at the event.

Now that we know the origin of the new rupee symbol (a fusion of the Latin ‘R’ and Devanagari ‘Ra’), here’s a look at how other major currency symbols evolved across the world.

US DOLLAR: While Ayn Rand, in her novel Atlas Shrugged, supports the theory that the sign is derived from the initials of United States (U superimposed on S, and then the bottom of U snipped off to get the symbol with two strokes), the most popular explanation is that it came from Spain. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it is derived from the figure 8, representing the Spanish ‘pieces of eight’. By the time of the American Revolution in the late 18th century, the Spanish dollar had gained significance over the colonial British pound. Experts say the $ sign evolved from the old Spanish abbreviation for peso, ‘ps’, which eventually became an S with a single stroke denoting P.

BRITISH POUND: The symbol £ is simply the letter L, derived  from the Latin word libra, meaning scales, which also gave rise to the abbreviation lb for pound as a measure of weight. This was used since the currency pound was originally worth exactly one pound of pure silver. And hence the name too.

CHINESE YUÁN AND JAPANESE YEN:  Both mean ‘round object’ and use the symbol ¥, based on the letter Y. The yuán is the principal unit of Renminbi, which was circulated in its current avatar in 1949 and translates as ‘people’s currency’. 

EURO: The European Commission polled the public in 1996 on a shortlist of 10 designs for the symbol and ultimately selected €. The Commission has said that inspiration for the symbol came from the Greek letter epsilon, pointing to the cradle of European civilisation, and the first letter of Europe, crossed by two parallel lines to certify the stability of the euro. A German named Arthur Eisenmenger later claimed he had designed the symbol decades earlier.

ISRAELI NEW SHEKEL: The ‘new shekel’  is denoted by combining the first Hebrew letters of each word (shekel and hadash).

Heads up, chest high. That’s how the Congress in Karnataka is feeling after organising a successful padayatra to counter the powerful Reddy brothers’ hold over Karnataka’s politics and mining business. The 300 km Bangalore-Bellary walkathon has rekindled grassroot interest and showed signs that the party’s traditional vote bank of backward classes, minorities, SCs and STs—which it had alienated—was not averse to returning. There was enviable unity among senior leaders as they marched to take on the Reddys on their own turf, an invitation the powerless veterans grabbed after being challenged on the Assembly floor. And the rousing reception was testimony that the Congress was in revival mode. 

It was the miracle that the grand old party here, filled with inductees from the erstwhile Janata Dal, was waiting for. During the padayatra, as crowds collected, internal politics was forgotten and the pace quickened. Even critics in the opposition were surprised to see ordinary folk marching along with the leaders.

To counter this applause, B Sriramulu, Karnataka’s health minister and a Reddy camp follower, rallied from Bellary to Mysore. But the response to that was less dramatic, even forgetful. There’s cheer in the Congress camp now, four long years after the JD-S walked into the BJP camp. Finally, there are some positive vibes for Congressmen, who have had a streak of lost elections—Assembly polls in May 2008, Zila Parishad polls, and recently, Bangalore’s civic polls. Clearly, it’s time for the party to seize the moment.