That is the title of a Ted talk by Pico Iyer. You can find the talk at the link below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m6dV7Xo3Vc
I do not know enough about Iyer other than to say that I like his style of English. Simple, crisp, elegant prose. That is a lot more than I can say about my laboured, pedantic style of writing. He has a conversational style of writing that makes many complex ideas accessible to intellectually less endowed critters like me.
Okay fine. I grant I have flagellated myself plenty that you find it painfully boring. But I cannot seem to denounce myself enough. Call it whatever complex you like.
Back to Iyer. What I am unable to say is how deep a scholar he is. He must be well read for sure. But then that does not say much. I know of people who are widely read who have remained unaffected by what they have read.
What I love about this Ted talk is the way he develops the idea of home. It is all about rootlessness in a spatial sense. About how one may not have a place called home in the traditional sense yet feel at home wherever one is.
Before I continue with my thoughts on the talk I want my younger readers to note how Iyer develops his ideas seamlessly. Flow is key to great communication. Iyer is a master at that. He covers a broad range of issues in some depth, all very engagingly. There is a lot to learn as a lesson in communication.
I could relate to Iyer's talk in some small measure. Born and raised in Trivandrum in a Tam Brahm family, I was schooled in Kochi, Chennai and Bangalore, I worked in Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi and Kuwait.
That is not as peripatetic an existence as that of many others I know. But I have moved around enough to feel rootless.
More than those periodic movements it is the way I was treated by the communities amongst whom I lived that adds to the rootlessness. As Iyer says about himself, going by where I was born, I am a Keralite, although I often describe myself as a Mallu, even though my ancestry is Tamilian.
To the Keralites I was always a Pattan pejoratively, or more respectably Swami, both being terms to denote Tamil Brahmins settled in Kerala. That kind of sealed the deal for me and people like me: We could never be one of them, even if we ate fish and drank toddy, just like any other Mallu and contrary to our traditions and even if we embraced the matrilineal tradition!
When I moved to Chennai for college, the Tamilians ridiculed me as a Palakkadan, a term used for all Tamilians hailing from Kerala. That was a double insult. And here is why.
As people from Southern Kerala we strenuously distinguished ourselves from Palakkadans who had settled in Northern Kerala. They hailed from Tanjore and we from Tirunelveli. We were not quite cheese and chalk; but we were sufficiently distinct from each other, shall we say. Further, with one stroke of the brush we Keralites were rendered aliens to the social fabric of Tamil Nadu.
And then when I went to live in Mumbai I realised that all of us from the South of Vindhyas belonged to this pre-historic tribe called the Madrasi. Nearly everything we did could and would be held up to ridicule: The way we ate with our hands, the way we ended our English sentences, the way we pronounced M, the lack of variety in our food which earned us another contemptuous sobriquet, Idly Vada Sambar (IVS for short). I could go on an on.
I guess you get the picture. At one level we Tam Brahms from Kerala, like the Jews of the world, are condemned to a life of permanent alienism.
Yet we have to have a home. We need to earn a living and keep ourselves and our brood from starvation and deprivation. We have to raise families.
So we build homes wherever we are. And those homes are not confined by the narrow boundaries of where we were born, raised, educated, married from or worked.
Our homes are where we find people that we are happy to live amongst, people that accept us for who we are, people that are willing to love us unconditionally, unmindful of what we eat, what we wear, of how we speak English and the language that we speak at home.
Praise be to the Lord that there are plenty of them in this world. That brings me to the key takeaway from Iyer's talk. The good news, as an American might declare, is that in a world that is increasingly globalised the notion of home is bound to move more and more along these lines.
The Trumps, the Neo Nazis, the jihadists, the Geert Wilders and the Marine Le Pens may appear to hold sway for short periods in the history of mankind. They are like meanders in the path of a broad river. The broader course of history is inexorable. How else does one explain what historians refer to as the commensality among the numerous races and peoples of the world across thousands of years that has gone into making this interesting planet that we inhabit?
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
PS: A note to myself. I have been hitting my blog more often lately. I know I write when I am in pain. Writing helps me offload the pain, for a while at least. I need this note to remind myself that I wrote this in a moment of somewhat intense pain. That there is a subliminal connection between the thread here and the pain. But I do not need a reminder to tell me what the source of that pain is. Pain stays in nicely self-labelled bottles. That is its hallmark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m6dV7Xo3Vc
I do not know enough about Iyer other than to say that I like his style of English. Simple, crisp, elegant prose. That is a lot more than I can say about my laboured, pedantic style of writing. He has a conversational style of writing that makes many complex ideas accessible to intellectually less endowed critters like me.
Okay fine. I grant I have flagellated myself plenty that you find it painfully boring. But I cannot seem to denounce myself enough. Call it whatever complex you like.
Back to Iyer. What I am unable to say is how deep a scholar he is. He must be well read for sure. But then that does not say much. I know of people who are widely read who have remained unaffected by what they have read.
What I love about this Ted talk is the way he develops the idea of home. It is all about rootlessness in a spatial sense. About how one may not have a place called home in the traditional sense yet feel at home wherever one is.
Before I continue with my thoughts on the talk I want my younger readers to note how Iyer develops his ideas seamlessly. Flow is key to great communication. Iyer is a master at that. He covers a broad range of issues in some depth, all very engagingly. There is a lot to learn as a lesson in communication.
I could relate to Iyer's talk in some small measure. Born and raised in Trivandrum in a Tam Brahm family, I was schooled in Kochi, Chennai and Bangalore, I worked in Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi and Kuwait.
That is not as peripatetic an existence as that of many others I know. But I have moved around enough to feel rootless.
More than those periodic movements it is the way I was treated by the communities amongst whom I lived that adds to the rootlessness. As Iyer says about himself, going by where I was born, I am a Keralite, although I often describe myself as a Mallu, even though my ancestry is Tamilian.
To the Keralites I was always a Pattan pejoratively, or more respectably Swami, both being terms to denote Tamil Brahmins settled in Kerala. That kind of sealed the deal for me and people like me: We could never be one of them, even if we ate fish and drank toddy, just like any other Mallu and contrary to our traditions and even if we embraced the matrilineal tradition!
When I moved to Chennai for college, the Tamilians ridiculed me as a Palakkadan, a term used for all Tamilians hailing from Kerala. That was a double insult. And here is why.
As people from Southern Kerala we strenuously distinguished ourselves from Palakkadans who had settled in Northern Kerala. They hailed from Tanjore and we from Tirunelveli. We were not quite cheese and chalk; but we were sufficiently distinct from each other, shall we say. Further, with one stroke of the brush we Keralites were rendered aliens to the social fabric of Tamil Nadu.
And then when I went to live in Mumbai I realised that all of us from the South of Vindhyas belonged to this pre-historic tribe called the Madrasi. Nearly everything we did could and would be held up to ridicule: The way we ate with our hands, the way we ended our English sentences, the way we pronounced M, the lack of variety in our food which earned us another contemptuous sobriquet, Idly Vada Sambar (IVS for short). I could go on an on.
I guess you get the picture. At one level we Tam Brahms from Kerala, like the Jews of the world, are condemned to a life of permanent alienism.
Yet we have to have a home. We need to earn a living and keep ourselves and our brood from starvation and deprivation. We have to raise families.
So we build homes wherever we are. And those homes are not confined by the narrow boundaries of where we were born, raised, educated, married from or worked.
Our homes are where we find people that we are happy to live amongst, people that accept us for who we are, people that are willing to love us unconditionally, unmindful of what we eat, what we wear, of how we speak English and the language that we speak at home.
Praise be to the Lord that there are plenty of them in this world. That brings me to the key takeaway from Iyer's talk. The good news, as an American might declare, is that in a world that is increasingly globalised the notion of home is bound to move more and more along these lines.
The Trumps, the Neo Nazis, the jihadists, the Geert Wilders and the Marine Le Pens may appear to hold sway for short periods in the history of mankind. They are like meanders in the path of a broad river. The broader course of history is inexorable. How else does one explain what historians refer to as the commensality among the numerous races and peoples of the world across thousands of years that has gone into making this interesting planet that we inhabit?
Nanni....Namaskaaram...
PS: A note to myself. I have been hitting my blog more often lately. I know I write when I am in pain. Writing helps me offload the pain, for a while at least. I need this note to remind myself that I wrote this in a moment of somewhat intense pain. That there is a subliminal connection between the thread here and the pain. But I do not need a reminder to tell me what the source of that pain is. Pain stays in nicely self-labelled bottles. That is its hallmark.
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