The Love-story of Dhola-Maru – An Indian Folk-tale of Forever Love :)

Here’s another love-story for those in love.
(If you are looking for The Game of Love – Play My Love My Valentine on your iPad.)

Dhola-Maru – A Rajasthani Folk Tale of Love

(Retold with love by me.)

It was quite early in the morning. The sun hadn’t risen yet, but all of Poogal was awake, and so was King Pingal. The Queen had gone into labor about 11 in the night and after more than 6 hours, there still wasn’t any news. The king loved his queen. According to the royal custom they had got married when she was four and he was eight. It was decided then, and he had been in love with the queen since – despite her not joining him in her forever home until she turned fifteen. Now, the king stood outside the queen’s chambers, waiting to hear whether he had fathered a prince who would inherit the kingdom after he was gone, or a princess who would bring joy and good fortune to Poogal.

“Maharaj, Congratulations! Our princess has arrived,” said the two women who had emerged from the queen’s chamber.

King Pingal had become the father of a lovely daughter. He and the queen already had her name ready. She would be called Maru.

—++++—

“Dhola, stop playing with that wooden chariot. You need to get out in a real chariot and see the kingdom!”
Damyanti, Dhola’s mother was one of the most beautiful women of her times. She and Dhola’s father King Nal too had their own love-story, but just now she wasn’t thinking about Nal. Instead, she was worrying about her son’s love for his toys. He was four, and he should’ve outgrown his affection for those silly toys by now. After all he was a prince, and the future king of Narwar!

The first step towards making him more responsible was – find a bride for him. He was old enough to be married.

—++++—

So Dhola and Maru got married. But then they won’t be together until Maru attained puberty, so after the marriage Maru continued to live in her father’s palace and Dhola returned to his. Unfortunately, Nal died soon after Dhola’s marriage. As Dhola was a kid when he had gotten married, he forgot all about Maru and when he grew up, he got married a second time to a beautiful and…cunning woman called Malwani.

All this time, King Pingal and Maru kept sending messages to Dhola, but Malwani who obviously didn’t want Maru to return into Dhola’s life, intercepted those messages, and Maru remained forgotten.

—++++—

That evening was different in the Kingdom of Poogal. The folk-dancers and singers who were nomads had arrived in the kingdom and they had magical voices. Their voices were so beautiful that even the King heard about them, and decided that there must be a show for the royalty.

Maru too had heard about these dancers and how they moved from one kingdom to another, performing for the kings, the queens, the princes, and the princesses. So she called their lead-dancer aside and asked her to convey her message of love to Dhola through a song-and-dance sequence.

—++++—

“Why must you send a message to him, princess?” asked Umar Sumara. He couldn’t fathom why the princess was unable to forget her husband. She had absolutely no recollection of the wedding and had never laid eyes on Dhola. Yet she appeared to be smitten by him, while he, Umar Sumar, who had been in love with her, and who did everything to keep her safe and happy, was constantly overlooked!

“Because he is my husband, and because our match was made in heaven,” replied the princess as she turned away from him.’

—++++—

Malvani, Dhola’s wife, too heard of the folk-dancers and singers when they arrived in Narwar. Malvani was fond of music and she thought of arranging a program for her husband. The program however, was designed to remind King Dhola of his first wife, Maru. As he sat there watching the dancers replay his own wedding, Dhola was reminded of the day, and of his wife who must’ve grown into a lovely princess now.

He talked to the dancers, and to Malvani’s chagrin, he asked them to tell Maru that he’d come for her.

—++++—

Dhola and his men were on their way to Poogal, when a disheveled messenger from Narwar reached them with a message. Queen Malvani was dead, and according to the customs, King Dhola must return to cremate the queen. Dhola however knew his queen well, and decided against returning.

While Dhola was approaching Poogal, Umar Sumara was planning too stop him from reaching there. Sumara’s heart was set upon marrying Princess Maru and he thought that if Dhola didn’t reach Poogal, she’ll forget him in time…leaving the coast clear for Sumar.

—++++—

The sentry came into the King’s tent and bowed before him.
“Maharaj, a man wants to meet you. He has news from Poogal.”
“Send him in!” ordered an excited King who wondered whether Maru had sent him a love-message. He had no idea that the man who had come to meet him was a rival in love.
“Maharaj, Maru is already married to another man.”
King Dhola gave him a sharp look and asked, “who is she married to?”
Sumar, who was himself in love with Princess Maru couldn’t lie any more. And Dhola realized that he was lying.

—++++—

So Dhola reached Poogal and brought his bride back to Narwar, where they happily lived ever after.

—++++—

Questions?
Leave them here and I’ll try to answer 🙂

The Greatest Love-stories told with added sugar and spice…coming soon to this blog :)

Folks,

February is about to welcome March to this blog. March brings spring along. In my humble opinion, March and April are the months when love really and truly blooms. Actually, there’s no season or time for love, it’s just that when nature herself is at her prettiest best, you feel more like celebrating love.

In these months, I’ll bring you the best love-stories of the world. I won’t copy-and-paste them from anywhere, because I hate cheating whether in love or in writing. So I’ll write them for you – and if there’s time, I’ll even sketch those two loving souls for you.

If you want these stories to land in your inbox, just click the subscribe button in the right sidebar.

That’s all for now 🙂

I’ll be back with the first story in a couple of days.

Now go, give a kiss to your love. Remember, love thrives when expressed 🙂

– Nifty.

Yes,

Love Thrives when Expressed.

The Day After Valentine’s Day – What does it spell for you?

• Contentment?
• Bliss?
• Longing?
• Disappointment?
• Anger?
• Loneliness?

Love doesn’t happen because of Valentine’s Day nor does it die because of it. If you are feeling happy, content, and blessed – it’s because love existed before Valentine’s Day – in your hearts and lives. Valentine’s Day just happened along the way and brought along ways and means of expression.

On the other hand, if it didn’t go well for you, there could be myriad reasons for it:

Think about it:

Expectations belied due to:

• Absentmindedness (trust me on this.)
• Lack of seriousness (this could be more serious.)
• An unethical rival on the scene, or even
• A lack of true love.

The first three should be handled – the third with some care. The last one should be acknowledged. It’s a signal for you to move on. Being single again can be a bliss as it gives you an opportunity to find true love. And remember that Valentine’s Day too will be back again, next year.

In the meantime, follow this blog; because love isn’t going anywhere and neither am I. If you’d like to connect, leave a comment 🙂

54 Sweet Love Messages for your Sweetheart – Printed on a Beautiful Valentine’s Day Card!

You want to send him a message that tells him that he is the one for you?
You want to tell her how much she means to you?

You wonder how you must do it – you want to find out a way to reach out spontaneously…any time, all the time. You want to think about your sweetheart, when you are traveling in the metro, when you are standing on the bus-stand waiting for the bus, even when you are together.

You wonder how they must’ve expressed their loved and wooed their sweethearts in the days gone by. In the days when there was no email or even mailmen to deliver your cards and flowers; and you wonder how it would’ve been if you had been a prince or a princess, and fallen in love.

You wonder how it must feel to have a rival in love, and then to beat him or her. You have an iPad and you want to play a game of love that isn’t old wine in new bottle; and that is romantic to the core. You want to play a game that has been created by two gremlins in love – who have built every little detail of a game with a loving touch and a caring thought.

You must then visit the iTunes link of My Love My Valentine, and download the game, and then if you like it tell your friends about it – because love and happiness should be experienced by everyone 🙂

And yes, email 54 sweet love-messages printed on a beautiful card, to your sweetheart from within the game. 

May you find love, and if you’ve found it already may you keep it forever.

Bullet for My Valentine and… Valentine’s Day. Really?

Question: So why “Bullet for My Valentine” call themselves by this mysterious name?

Answer: This Heavy Metal band, which was formed in 1998, released its first album”The Poison,” in the US on February 14th 2006.

Question: But why “Bullet for My Valentine?”

Honest Submission: I’ve no idea of the true story behind the name, but then here’s some bit of theorizing:

Possible Answers:

One of the musicians (Mathew Tuck, Michael Thomas, Michael Paget, and Jason James) had suffered from a broken heart, right before they launched their first album on Valentine’s day.

OR

They wanted their album to hit the mark and win hearts on Valentine’s day and so they decided to call themselves “Bullet for my Valentine!”

I’ve no idea whether any of their songs have anything to do with Valentine’s Day, but I’ve realized that some of the lyrics of their songs have a strong dark streak.

You can also read more about them here.

 

My Love My Valentine – A Unique Game of Romance and Rivalry – A Valentine’s Day Gift for your Sweetheart.

 

 

 

iPad owners, check out the Free Version of MLMV at https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/my-love-my-valentine-hd-lite/id599222686?mt=8

My Love My Valentine is a new gaming experience and a unique quest for love!

In this 54-level iPad Game My Love My Valentine, you woo your sweetheart by sending love messages to him or her through your trusty dove, Snowy. However, as it often happens in life, in this game too you have a rival-in-love. This is why you are not the only one sending messages to your sweetheart. But your rival believes that everything is fair in love and war, and so tries different underhand tactics to slow you down.

Your rival tossing those burning matchsticks to destroy your writing material, is just a beginning. As you move through the 54 levels of this game, your rival also sends love-assassins stop you from winning your love.

Your rival sends:

• a pixie who zaps aways your writing material,
• a crow who snatches away your notepaper,
• fireballs that whizz past burning everything in their way including your pens,
• a pigeon with no sense of propriety who craps on your love-letters,
• a cowardly yet handsome mouse who shreds your envelopes, and
• the magic ink, which keeps vanishing from your love-notes!

(Read the stories of Snowy the Dove and the Love-Assassins by clicking their pictures in the sidebar.)

The action continues to build-up with every successive level as your rival and the love-assassins become smarter, faster, and stronger.

My Love My Valentine – A Game of Romantic Courtship for iPad available on the App Store!

Wooing your sweetheart isn’t easy with these love-assassins running lose. Voracio the crow doesn’t give up and the whizzing fireballs don’t discriminate! Be careful. Don’t get addicted!

Deal with the crow and the whizzing fireballs, while your rival competes with you for your sweetheart’s loving gaze.

Envy gives way to enthusiasm as you battle for your love through 54 exciting levels, sending 54 different love messages to your sweetheart!

Prepare yourself for the battle of love. Experience Romance, Envy, Action, and Excitement!

“My Love My Valentine – A Game of Romantic Courtship – MLMV HD” by Grouchy Gremlins brings you:

• 54 Levels of Increasing Excitement!
• 6 Romantic Locations!!
• 54 Original Love Messages to Send!!!
• 6 Love-assassins to Face and Defeat!!!!

With your trusty dove on your side, can you win this Game of Love?

Here is the  YouTube Video of My Love My Valentine Game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuCaDy8XOHI

My Love My Valentine – The Game for the Romantics of the World: App Store Arrival on February 01, 2013!

I am pleased as punch to announce that My Love My Valentine – A Game of Romantic Courtship – MLMV HD is arriving on the App Store on February 01, 2013.

A quick overview of the Game:

In “My Love My Valentine”, you woo your sweetheart by writing and sending love messages to him or her, through, of course, your trusty dove, Snowy. However, as it happens in life and also in this game, you have a rival-in-love. This rival isn’t all that ethical, and believes that everything is fair in love and war. So on one hand this rival competes with you to win the affection of your loved one, and on the other, tries to stop you from sending your love-messages.

That your rival tosses burning matchsticks to destroy your writing material is just a beginning, as you move through the 54 levels of this game, a pixie zaps aways your material, a crow snatches away your notepaper, fireballs whizz past burning everything in their way including your pens, a pigeon with no sense of propriety craps on your stuff, a cowardly yet handsome mouse shreds your envelopes, and the magic ink keeps disappearing from your messages!

In the coming few days, I’ll be posting the stories of the agents on this blog. You can already read about Grouchina the Pixie and Voracio the crow 🙂

Until my next post then. In the meantime, go, fall in love!

PS: My fingers are now growing numb – for cold and for continuous typing…I’ll go, send some messages to my sweetheart. You’ll meet him soon…yes, here, on this blog 🙂

Why Voracio the Crow isn’t easy to dodge? What drives this agent of your rival in love?

The constant cawing would take its toll, Voracio knew that, but he also knew that his voice was his single biggest asset and that without his cawing prowess he was doomed to live in oblivion. Things hadn’t been easy for Voracio for the last many months. It was in June last year that he had lost his place as the evening entertainer in the best bird-club in town, to a rooster. He knew it would happen one day, but he didn’t expect it to happen so soon. Voracio was a rapper and these days rock was the in-thing…especially among the birds. Hip-hop was something that didn’t suit Voracio’s voice at all, so his options were somewhat limited.

Had Voracio been the carefree bachelor of the year before, this wouldn’t have irked him so much. At the beginning of last year, he had fallen for his beautiful crow and proposed. His decision of marriage had shocked Voracio almost as much as it had shocked his friends, but then until you’ve experienced the full force of love, you’d never understand it. Any way, the long and short of it all was that Voracio was facing difficulties in making both ends meet. This was especially painful because just recently Mrs. Voracio had given birth two two beautiful chicks, a boy and a girl, and Voracio was extremely worried about his ability to pay the remaining EMIs on his nest. If the nest went, it would devastate the family.

While Voracio was just a very normal kind of crow who didn’t have any special talents (except that he could rap,) he had a trait that very few in this world possess. He could persevere and persist. Perseverance is something that often spells the difference between success and failure; and Voracio knew this. So he went flying from bird-club to bird-club, hoping to land a job that will help him pay his bills. Nothing worked out, for a very long time, until just last week he landed a job. He had to rap twice a week, in one of seedier bird-clubs, usually frequented by the birds of prey.

It was here at this club, where he first met Grouchy Gordon, an owl so ancient that he had stopped looking any older. Gordie was sitting at table in the shadows, on a branch that was jutting so out of the tree that no other bird ever sat on it. He asked Voracio to join him at his table, and then asked him if he wanted to do something different, something that was more thrilling than singing rap songs to a half-loony audience.

While Voracio wasn’t very comfortable talking to this shady looking character, he decided that listening won’t harm him, and so he listened.

“I’ve heard that you can be persistent. Have I heard right?” the Owl asked.

Voracio thought of his incessant requests for an audition and his continued followups with the club, and nodded.

“Work part-time for us. All you’d be required to do is snatch away the notepaper that this poor lovelorn individual uses for writing, or snatch away the written love-notes, and you’ll be paid a gold coin for every notepaper written or blank, that you bring back.”

He obviously couldn’t refuse. If only he could get five gold coins a week, he’d be living like a king!

• This is why you encounter Voracio the Crow in My Love My Valentine – The Game of Romantic Courtship. Experience his perseverance and persistence. My Love My Valentine – MLMV HD is reaching the App Store on February 1, 2013! I will update this page soon upon its release so bookmark and follow, if you want to experience love, romance, and rivalry in a completely new format.
• If you are looking for a tip to escape Voracio’s single-minded pursuit of your love-notes, you will find it here, but wait until you’ve cleared the first nine levels! 
• And yes, if you want to gift hours of fun, 54 Levels of increasing thrill, a dash of envy, and 54 Love Messages to your sweetheart, think gifting My Love My Valentine to him or her. Did I tell you that it’s for girls and guys both?!!

Why Grouchina zaps away your love notes and messages? The Inside Scoop!

“This isn’t going to work,” thought Grouchina, “I will have to find a part-time job that can help me pay the bills.”

Grouchina wasn’t the kind of pixie you are used to reading about in fairytales and seeing in Disney movies, she was a real, down-to-earth, practical pixie. While the pixies that you see in those Disney movies are waif-like creatures draped in short little skirts made of flower-petals and leaves and would rather fall dead than be seen wearing spectacles; Grouchina preferred denims and found spectacles a lot handier than contact-lenses. There were other dissimilarities too, although a lot less glaring but equally disconcerting, if one looked closer. While most of those other, more popular pixies look a lot younger – in fact quite into their teens, Grouchina looked like she was comfortably in her twenties, and unlike most other pixies she was throughly disenchanted with the world.

When Grouchina was inside her home in an old oak-tree hollow, she was the happiest. She’d wear a pair of denims, perch her specs on her little pert nose, and snuggle into a corner with her drawing pencils and her sketchbook. But then it wasn’t easy to let go of the pixie community totally, nor was it possible to stay in and not go gathering the cherries, which were Grouchina’s staple diet. So for such times, when she had to necessarily step out, Grouchina had a pretty imitation-petals dress hanging in her wardrobe. This was her only dress, her armor against the giggling, teasing gaggle of pixies that she was bound to meet if she stepped out.

It was sort of…crazy! It was like she had two different pixies inside her. There was Grouchina, the grouchy pixie, dressed in her imitation-petals dress, zapping everyone and everything that had the misfortune of crossing her path; and then there was Artiana, the sweet absent-minded pixie who just wanted to draw and paint everything that she saw.

But then, buying the paint, the canvases, and everything else cost money, and Grouchina was terribly short of it. So when Signora, her Aunt approached her with the assignment of zapping love notes and envelopes that belonged to the poor lovelorn human, she found herself in a fix.

“The more you zap, the more you earn,” said Aunt Signora.

“But is it right?” asked Grouchina, “I mean, is it right morally? This poor love-struck individual is trying to play a game of romantic courtship, and I the evil, grouchy pixie, zaps away the labor of love to make money. Doesn’t that make me a mercenary of kinds.”

Signora cocked her right eyebrow, brought her face closer to Grouchina’s, and cackled, “Yes, it does. A love mercenary, I suppose. But consider this, my righteous little niece. If you took up this assignment, you’d never be short of art supplies. Think about it.”

With that parting shot, Signora took flight, and Grouchina was left alone. She fought her demons for a very long time, but then she caved in. After all, the only thing that she ever wanted to do in life was paint… and eat cherries. And if this job could help her realize her dreams, she was game.

Snowy the Dove and the Villain’s Agents – Your Love Your Valentine should be yours and yours alone!

February 14th draws closer. We know that you’ll be walking on the fluffy clouds of love and romance on Feb 14th, but sending some sweet love-notes to your heart-throb before Valentine’s Day won’t hurt. In fact, it could make your day more memorable. Think about it. You still have about 10 days to consider this, because by then this game of Love, Romance, and Rivalry will be there in the App Store, for you to own and play.

Today, I am presenting the opening screen of MLMV-HD here.

Click the image for bigger view.

On this screen you can see:

• Grouchina the Pixie,
• Voracio the Crow,
• Snowy the Dove,
• Crappigeo the Pigeon, and
• Blopty the Mouse! (Yes, yes, yes. He is the same guy.)

 

More coming…