October 3, 2011
While in US, I was a frequent listener to the Hit 96.7 FM, a Dubai-based Malayalam radio station that has reliable online live streaming. Their hourly news recaps was good for keeping abreast with Kerala news. Now that I am here and it is impossible not to hear the news from neighbors' television or radio, I had not accessed the streaming for the last couple of months. This morning, it was decided that the channel can provide background score for the floor mopping. Since it would still be wee hours of the morning in Dubai, the blabbering of DJs would also be absent.
The stream alternated between truly atrocious nursey rhyme quality film songs and top grade Vayalar-ONV fare. This inconsistency encroached into my mopping. I realized that I generally like songs if they have a couple words which are not easily understood. I wonder if it is true for the general appreciation of all things linguistic. Should an element of learning be involved so that the brain is impressed? The appeal of freshness is coupled with learning. Isn't this true for literature and poetry? Isn't it another reason why there is an inexplicable sense of "highness" associated with the Hindu newspaper compared to the Times of India?
I watched the first episode of Stephen Fry's Planet Word on youtube. A perfect presenter for a series that deals with language. A human baby learns around 10 new words a day after it is two years old. It is a prolific rate of acquisition. I think it lingers on late into the life. We look for new words, new combinations and are subconsciously pleased when we find them. When accompanied with music, it is such a great throwback to the diaper days (I never wore any but it is easy to convey the age this way) when through action songs, rhymes or general singsong delivery new words had expanded our world inside. This must be why I prefer "namra sheersharayi nilku nin munnil kamra nakshatra kanyakal" to say "tharangal nanichu kannu chimmi" (Insert your favorite ghazal or Shakespearean line here followed by something from Altaf Raja or Dubya).
It must be the same reason why the great Indian repetition irritates. The same sentences are spoken over and over again to drive home the point or in the vain hope of extracting the same emotional impact it had the first time. But since there is nothing new, the mind resents.
Though I didn't have any important decision to make, when I went to pee around noon today, I could hear a male voice babble "raashutti" repeatedly. Owing to the ventilation aperture near the ceiling, the neighborhood sounds freely waft into the bathroom. Looking out of my room window, I could see the man responsible for the baby talk. He was one of the push-cart ironing service men. They usually park their ironing station in the shade of the car porch of the unoccupied home next door. He was talking to a baby over his mobile phone. A lot of meaningless but musical sounds were made interspersed with the "raashutti". I presume his baby daughter is named Raashi or Rashmi. I am sure he has not heard Stephen Fry's advice that there is no substitue, no disc, no software package, no coaching program, that can stand for some good old parental pampering when it comes to language learning.
On top of rat fever and dengue fever, two more dreaded words have been filling the airwaves for the last few days: load shedding and power cut. And tonight, right after 8:30, power went off. I have a small UPS connected to the modem so that I can stay online to wind up conversations or any 'cloudy' documents I might be working on. Half an hour powercut was a standard feature of growing up in Kerala in the 90s. It would go precisely for a predetermined 30 minutes during the hours between 6:30 and 9:30. It was a wonderful service for thieves. For our small neighborhood, this half an hour was conference time. Everyone would come out to their gates, some would sit down on their gate steps and conversation would flow interrupted by mosquito-induced clapping and self-slapping. So there was sense of nostalgia tonight in the darkness.
Couple of our neighbors now have inverters, so there is a bit more light than two decades ago. Varkichen uncle and Kunjumol aunty, always vocal presences at these conferences back then, were present only in spirit tonight. With cracking dams, unmaintained generators and mismanaged power grids, power cuts will be around in Kerala even after all of us become spirits.
Perhaps in such future sessions of darkness, the light of fond memories will shine on our names!
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