Anecdotal Evidence

Me: I give up. Ed: Just another few thousand words. Come on.. Me: Hmmm Ed: Uh oh ! I don't like that grin 800 steps up to the 80 feet breathtaking monolith. It is dated around 981 and is supposed to Asia's biggest monolith. It has withstood over 1000 years of the onslaughts of weather and continues to impress people from all over. Though proportionally speaking he is less reassuring that Michelangelo's David. (Exeunt philistine) The finish - for example seen in these nails and fingers is just wonderful. I don't know anyone who can even write a few lines on paper without scratching. Imagine a monolith ! Karnataka tourism was simple and impressive. For the kind of crowd the place handles daily, it was very well maintained. We in TN have inscriptions lying about every place, with no idea what the deuce they are about. Sravanabelagola has hundreds of inscriptions. Every inscription has been given a serial number, has a glass case over it and an explanatory note for those i...

We Tamils are Hindians too. We bellow hoarse about how annoyed we are with Hindians who land in Rameshwaram and expect to be spoken to in Hindi. However when we travel to any place in the South we expect to be understood in our pristine, divine, classical, ancient tongue by the locals, who - after all, we say, only speak a minor linguistic variant. Much worse, the brethren invariably oblige. "That's not true of all us" you say, well its not true of all Rameshwaram visiting Hindians I will say. Then we can talk about percentages and relative weights of our - heh heh - anecdotal evidence (sheesh !) "Kadubu bEku. undhA ?" I ask in my uncertain linguistic babytalk and the waiter pours sweet sambhar on my enthusiasm with "illai saar. Idli veNumA ?" For a state which has its own flag, the part of Karnataka I visited was too all-welcoming. Particularly Mysore. So much so that I couldn't get a taste of the local cuisine. So most of my conversations went l...

Don't think of it as dumbing it down. That is condescending and incorrect. But when you can snip out aspects of your personality which are not as essential as you would like to think they are, then you - and I mean everyone - would be more accessible and categorizable. But isn't it all about growing in all possible directions and realizing all that we can. Most welcome sir. But for your own good, keep the dichotomy between "what you are" and "what you do" clear. As in "You like flowers" vs. "you are a flower liker". To expect "like like same same"s is to inflate your liking for flowers. You don't like them that much really. Confusing causal cycles there but worth trying. But it's going to be tough.Particularly with others, what they do is what they are. They are either that or not. Poetic appreciation for instance. Let me use a lovely phrase from நற்றிணை for example. வினை முடித்தன்ன இனியோள் . Roughly translates to ...

"Our sambhar may be sweet, our women too forward, our government right-wing, we may have opened the gates to a greater integration with -what the informed rightly call - the North Indies...But sir, at the end of the day, we have Cubbon Park. Your city does not." he said dipping a slice of his kadubu into a cup of liquid jaggery. I smiled patronizingly. "The reason for that is quite simple sir" , I said dusting the sand off my gentle moustache. "You see, a place like Cubbon Park with its deceptive sense of idyll encourages all and sundry to attempt poetry. Even I came within an ace of that this weekend about Eden, Fall of Man and all. Scary, no ? We - the Hindu reading population of Madras - take our role as protectors of our national language quite seriously. That is why we make do with Panagal Park and even build flyovers next to it. Even with that, our boundless imagination sometimes threatens to make us susceptible to poetic afflatus. Then, we sit down and...

We are good friends now and I really enjoy your company. I mean that and not in an all-words-fake-warmth way that is natural to that line. But just for a moment, can you imagine....how it would been if things had gotten serious between us back then. We had many things that clicked and truth be said, the freedom and flexibility I had with you, did in many ways make me whatever little I am. But I was always conscious of our dissance. For a while I thought I could like you in my own way but after a point I could not deny certain things. Like how you were always too quick and dare I say, of a rather unmanageable size for me. And I too meek and nondescript to match with you. We ended it right and now I am only even more sure of that. Aspects of you I knew and enjoyed have changed substantially but in some inexplicable way you are the same. I wish I could say the same about myself. Happy Valentine's Day Mumbai !