These last two years, my son, Arjun, has been showing a healthy (whatever that means!) interest in the opposite sex – and I have been privy to his elation as well as his heartbreaks…

We are very close – he often says I’m more like the older sister he never had than mother – I can nag, chivvy, mercilessly tease – or share a joke and even music I come across – this hip hop dance track Good Vibrations by Marky Mark & the Funky Bunch (featuring soul artiste Loleatta Holloway) that I saw on VH1’s Cardio Video is a recent example!

Only later did I realize that Marky Mark and Mark Wahlenberg are one and the same!  What a turn-around now compared to his bad-boy adolescent years!

Anyway, back to sonny’s love life!  Here’s a transcript of a year-old conversation:

Sonny:  You know, X isn’t really my type…

X was Sonny’s first girlfriend.

Me: What do you mean?

Sonny:  Well, er… (with a slightly embarrassed laugh) she’s too,  um, well-endowed  - and she’s short!

Me:  Desperation shows.

Sonny:  Mom!!!

Me:  Er, what’s your type anyway?

Sonny: (dreamily) Slim, athletic…

Me: (innocently) Oh! Well, I suppose opposites do attract…

Sonny makes a thunderous leap in my direction, muttering threats – and gives chase when I quickly scoot into the next room.  We then have a mock scuffle that ends in a hug!

I really enjoy this complex, caring, maddeningly irritating, talented teen…

© Sosha Srinivasan

I belatedly realized that there were a few categories that had been left out in the first post on Mallu Christian names…

The list continueth:

1.  Phonetically translated from shortened English names  (Elizabeth = Lizzy or Jessica = Jessie or Rosemary = Rosy) but then subsequently miss-spelled, e.g. Lissy or Licy (fortunately not Lousy!)  I once came across a Wincy – kept me wondering if a miss-spelled Eensy weensy spider nursery rhyme was responsible!   The reason is that the letter ‘z’ does not exist in Malayalam – the closest equivalents are ’s’ and ‘c’!

Male Mallus are not spared.  I once met a ‘Reggie’ (or so I thought) and innocently asked him if his full name was Reginald – as in the Archie comics.  he threw me a disgusted look and then spelled it out to dispel any doubt. “R-e-j-i : that’s my full first name.”

“Oh!” I replied, trying to be polite, “Ji like the Northies – with respect and all that jazz… ”  I trailed off as he gave me a blank look!

2.  Names that sound like noises – the most common from Kerala is Achu which sounds like a loud, too-late-to-check sneeze to me.

Tamil is not immune to similar tendencies – Kichu is extremely common diminutive of Krishna – I think that sounds like a politely suppressed sneeze!  I once met a Bhooma and couldn’t help thinking her name sounded like a mini explosion!

Here is a post from Timofeyevich on some more amazing laugh-aloud examples of Tamil names!

© Sosha Srinivasan

I’ve resigned from the job that I did over the last five-plus years – one that required me to commute a couple of hours every day.

I’ll hopefully be working from home in a few months’ time, but meanwhile I am taking a much-deserved break !

Another reason for this switchover was that the PC and broadband connection I recently obtained was lying idle the entire day – a terrible waste of a resource!

© Sosha Srinivasan

I relish creative stuff and commercials with a dash of humor always catch my eye.  This one made me laugh aloud – because an almost parallel story line runs at home!  My not-so-young son sometimes regresses into childhood and gives me a a long hug  or a nuzzle – and hubby dearest looks daggers at sonny from his corner…  Only (according to Wilkinson) hubby’s not anywhere in the competition – because he wears a full beard!

© Sosha Srinivasan

The story with a WW2 twist that I recounted in my previous two posts got me reminiscing about a few others…

During my stint as a management trainee at a Chennai hotel in the early 1980s – yes, the very same one where I had to do a juggling act with three telephones at the front desk(!) – I got talking to Mrs. Fernando*, an Anglo-Indian (Eurasian) lady in her fifties who worked in the linen room. One day she sprang a huge surprise on me when she told me she was a survivor of Japanese prison camps in Singapore/ Malaya! She was very young at the time, around nine or ten years of age, and she remembered being force marched for several months between POW camps with her family – and surviving it all!

It really is amazing how you can meet people who have the strangest stories to tell.

Which brings me to three excellent books based on each author’s experiences in South East Asia during the war.

Empire of the Sun (also made into a riveting movie directed by Steven Spielberg) by J G Ballard.

King Rat by James Clavell.

A Town Like Alice (US title: The Legacy) by Nevil Shute.

*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.

© Sosha Srinivasan

The story doesn’t end there.

Yohanan* stayed, thriving on the small kindnesses of the extended family, while Lukachen’s* wife cursed him every time she lay eyes on him – and treated him like a slave…

There he lived another ten years far from the land of his mother’s ancestors (Tamil Nadu) and even further from the land of his birth (Burma (Myanmar)), until Lukachen drew his last breath. The treatment he got from Lukachen’s widow only worsened until Lukachen’s youngest brother, who worked in Bombay (Mumbai) intervened. He arranged a job for Yohanan in the same city.

Yohanan, now a strapping young man, returned to our hometown every few years and his thoughts naturally turned to settling down. A young servant maid caught his eye, a fact not lost on the family. The wedding was arranged in due course and the couple moved to Bombay. After several years there, Yohanan landed a better-paid job in the UAE, where he lived and worked while his wife and three daughters stayed back in Mumbai, where they eventually bought a large, well-appointed apartment with his hard-earned money (something most Indians couldn’t even dream of in the 1970s and the 1980s).

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Yohanan was well into his fifth decade when he was felled by a massive heart attack. His daughters, though, subsequently did very well for themselves and the last I heard were well settled in the United States…

Footnote: I am not sure how Appachen’s brother who went to Singapore fared during WW2. I know, though, that he decided to settle there and his family flourished in the years that followed. One of his grand-daughters married a Singaporean Chinese, and another, a Swiss guy. Other cousins of mine from the same side of the family (the “house name” is Ikareth) have married, variously, a Swede, an Iranian, and Americans of Indian and Pakistani origin. Thus our generation is truly an international melange.

*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.

© Sosha Srinivasan

I spent quite a few summers at my maternal grandparents home in Kerala while growing up. Invariably there would be visitors – neighbors from across the hill or the next village dropping in for a leisurely chat and tea, and sometimes relatives on a round of visits during their vacation…

One such family was Yohanan’s* – only we didn’t know for sure whether we were blood relatives – or did we?

Once Yohanan and his family had left, Ammachy, my grandmother, filled me in on the history – and my jaw dropped and stayed that way for a long time – I’m not exaggerating.

It’s a story that is truly stranger than fiction – one of those amazing tales of not just adventure, but unimaginable hardship and heartbreak…

It all began in the 1930s when one of Appachen’s (my grandfather’s) dozen brothers (let’s call him Lukachen*) took off to seek his fortune in what was then colonial Burma (now Myanmar). He was followed closely by another brother who decided to try his luck in Singapore…

The Japanese conquest of Burma

But elation turned to consternation for, what was this? He had a young dark-skinned boy, not older than five, in tow!

Lukachen explained that he had traveled overland into Assam as part of a huge exodus of half a million strong Indians fleeing the Japanese invasion. The refugees died in their thousands of malaria, typhoid, dengue, infections, starvation, and gastrointestinal causes… It had taken him over a year to travel mostly on foot, down from Burma to our home state of Kerala in the deep south of peninsular India. He had joined a group of Tamil laborers traveling south when they were all stricken with cholera. Already weakened, the group, including the mother of the toddler, was decimated by the epidemic. Before she succumbed she had asked Lukachen, who had recovered from the diarrheal illness, to take responsibility for the child…

The only problem was that Lukachen’s wife – he had married shortly before leaving for Burma – wasn’t buying the story! It wasn’t helped by the fact that Lukachen refused to give up the child and put him in an orphanage… His wife then accused him of fathering the child… and our Kerala village buzzed with the scandal…

There was a family huddle and still Lukachen refused to back down. The child, by now named Yohanan*, stayed…

Did Lukachen actually father the child, or was it just that he took a promise made very seriously – or was it simply because he could not break a strong emotional bond he had formed with Yohanan on his long journey home? We never did find out…

*Name changed to protect the privacy of the individual concerned.

© Sosha Srinivasan

The nicest thing about this video is that it’s just 10 seconds long, so it doesn’t take ages to load! Have a laugh at the crazy denouement! I’m not sure whether it just happened accidentally or it was planned! Some people think it’s fake – a video that was mixed on something like Sony Vegas Pro. What do you think? Whatever it was, the end result is hilarious!

© Sosha Srinivasan

All those strange Mallu names suddenly make a lot of sense! Mine, though, does not belong to this category – read my post Tame that name for details. You have to admit, though – we Mallus know how to laugh at ourselves!

A relative of ours’ firstborn was named Sony – this was back in the 1980s when music tapes and the Walkman was the rage. When my cousin George heard of it, he chuckled and quipped, “What are they going to name their next two kids – National and Panasonic?”

Finally, the name ‘Boben’ is mentioned twice below – reminds me of a cartoon strip called Boben & Molly on the last page of a Malayalam magazine that my parents used to subscribe to during the 1970s in Bombay (Mumbai). We kids couldn’t read the language, so would pester my mom to, even though we mostly couldn’t understand the jokes – probably because they were political satires…

The formula below that I got through a mailing list may be old hat – from 2005 or thereabouts – but worth reproducing!

© Sosha Srinivasan

It has been a well kept secret for eons, but finally Itty Boben Jacob Elias Kuruvilla from Pazhookaville, near Thelmasherry, Kerala has consented to let us publish this classified Mallu formula, on the naming of Mallu Christian kids.

Note: The use of the letter ‘j’ is useful in the naming of sibling where names that sound alike are a novelty. eg: Ajji, Sajji, Majji, Bhajji and Nimajji, or Sijo, Lijo, Jijo, Anjo, Panjo, Banjo.

Bob Wolpert, 2003 recipient of the Distinguished Junior High School Mathematics Teaching Edyth May Sliffe Award – and my Math teacher at IST, sent me a reference to Improv Everywhere, in particular this video of Frozen in Grand Central Station, NYC:

Harmless, good, clean fun!

You can browse through the Improv Everywhere site too for more videos – or click on the link in my sidebar widget.

Turns out that Improv Everywhere’s creator, Charlie Todd, was also taught by Mr Wolpert. Talk about six degrees of separation! By the way, I loved Will Smith’s performance in the movie by the same name, didn’t you?

Here’s a similar, though more musically oriented stunt, from Antwerp, Belgium:

© Sosha Srinivasan