Touching an elder's feet as a gesture of respect, typically returned with a spoken blessing — a small daily ritual of the guru-shishya relationship extended into family life.
चलन-बलन · Chalan-Balan
Performed especially toward parents, grandparents, and teachers, particularly on festival mornings, before a journey, or at a wedding, charan sparsh is traditionally met with the elder placing a hand on the person's head and offering a blessing, ashirwad, in return.
The gesture is read as physically enacting humility toward accumulated experience and toward the specific line of teachers, gurus, already covered through several figures in this site's Rishi Parampara chapter, that knowledge is traditionally understood to pass through.