random, random blues

There’s a community on orkut for ‘fraud mallus’ and among the many reasons I don’t join (from the utter ugliness of that phrase to the realization that communities in orkut are only for people to show off to their friends), is the feeling that I don’t have a right to be anything but a true blue dyed-in-the-wool Malayali young man, of the kind my sister reserves a special loathing for. But the fact remains that in spite of having lived here most of my life, my malayaliness remains highly inadequate (inasmuch as i can measure)

 

Consider the facts: when I left home at 17, I had lived here all my life, heard malayalam on the street every day of my life, and was a devoted viewer of the Sunday afternoon Malayalam movie. And yet, the language I thought in (think in) is english, I grew up not knowing anything about malayalam music but knowing a great deal about kishore/rafi/mukesh, and the Malayalam I speak has always been this hotchpotch of really old usages which I’ve picked up from my grandparents, organized into sentences that started their lives in English and were laboriously translated before spoken. And the result sounds strange, even as I speak.  

 

Of course, I’m grateful for having been brought up English-thinking. Even if my English sometimes does end up in a strangely syntaxed tangle. But it’s still embarrassing when people here ask me “so where’re you from?” and I say from calicut, and then there’s this significant pause followed by “but where are you actually from?”. :-/. (Only the “so when do you finish school” question beats this one, in my experience. )

 

What brought this ramble on? I was bored this morning, so I looked through the bookshelf, and after discarding kanthapura (authors who look like they’re copying cadence from another language irritate me no end), parthibankanavu(in translation) and a wodehouse as reading options,  I looked through our (pretty impressive, considering that they’re hardly ever read) collection of Malayalam books, on an experimental basis. So I took down this book by anand (it’s called maranacertificate?) and two pages in, I have no idea whether this is great writing or merely ordinary, because I have no space to fit his writing into. I started writing a post for this blog wondering whether your ideas of what good writing is are shaped entirely by what you’ve read before (if someone had never ever read anything before in english, would he find the clichéd writing of a mills and boon more appealing than something as nuanced as salinger?!... that sort of thing), but then I realized that my inability to appreciate his writing probably stems mostly from an inability to understand precisely what he’s saying. Which depressed, me and led to these musings.  

 

Ps: I wish I’d written that other post. It might’ve been funny. J

 

Pps: I’m making a habit of ps.