I love Tamil

I saw "Mr & Mrs Iyer" recently. The heroine in that movie is a Tamilian and she brought back memories of a good old friend. Very soon after that, she mailed me and I went gaga about the movie and what it brought back. All through the movie I was thinking about Tamil and why I seemed to love it.

I am a Malayali brought up in Andhra Pradesh, so I know both Malayalam and Telugu. My association with Tamil, before I started to work, was due to Mani Ratnam, A R Rehman, Kamal Hassan and Illayaraja and their movies. I was never fond of Tamil in those days because I could not understand most of what I heard in Tamil. At work, I had many Tamil friends and could not resist falling in love with the language. I tried learning it earnestly, but could not complete. I still have my notes and hope to learnt it completely someday. At one point I had learnt the alphabet.

The thing about it is that I love to hear someone talk in Tamil. I remember once I was with a colleague of mine and his friends. I could not help feel very happy listening to them speak in Tamil. This time around when I went to India, I had to go to Chennai for my VISA interview and I secretly enjoyed exercising my Tamil diction (hoping to sound like a Palghat Iyer).

On a side note, one of the compliments I have received over time is that I look like a Tamil Brahmin. I guess it's due to my large forehead, which someone else said was baldness biding it's time to happen.

More -
Tamil Language
What I had to say about a tamil song
Movie Review: Mr. and Mrs. Iyer
Rediff Guide: Mr and Mrs Iyer

Livin' the dream

As I get ready for another work day, I am reminded that this month completes the fifth year of my work life.

All you guys who started work on 4 sep 2000, you rock the world! (That was when I started)

We surely missed the train, missed the Y2K boom, missed quickly ending up in the US with a nice paying job, missed the Java boom. But hey we did make companies like Infosys think about employee retention, we did see to that our voice made an impact in the annual surveys, we did make them revise their pay structure to accomodate for this huge group that had to be suddenly promoted and or given a hike.

And for all those co-dreamers who think of crossing in to the blue, rather US, all I have to say,being the one who got a chance to cross over, it will happen soon or later, keep the faith.

I like the ads for US Air Force, they all end with the line "Cross in to the blue". I guess my liking has more to do with my childhood dream of becoming a fighter pilot than anything else. Only planes I could pilot till date are F22 - raptor (thanks to good old PK), F18 - Hornet and couple of WWII planes (including Mustang, Hurricane, Spitfire, Stuka, Zero etc etc), except they were all part of computer games. The last one was from the game "Airfix - Dogfighter", one of my all-time favorite games. A game where, to use an American phrase, I kicked some serious butt. For all my fellow gamers from mangala, this is maverick, the guy who was forced to play with just the cannon for firepower, when you all went about shooting missiles and dropping bombs, I am livin' the dream, hope you are too. Maverick, is not a throw back to Tom Cruise in Top Gun. I was actually surprised when I learnt his call sign in the movie was same as mine. Believe me, I am being honest here.

More -
US Air Force
Airfix Dogfighter

Shalom

I have been fascinated by this word for a long time. I find it beautiful, it makes me think of a small stream that gurgles along unnoticed in the wild. When I was a kid, we used to get a magazine called "News from Israel" every month. My dad remembers of paying the annual subscription of 10 rupees once, but they never stopped sending the magazine after it expired. It had thick pages that me and my sis would use to cover our school note books after the initial brown paper wrapping went off. This magazine introduced me to Shalom and David's star. I was to learn the meaning of Shalom many years later, which made me like the word even more. Years later when I got a column of my own on Zatang.com, as part of the profile I had to write what was "Zzar's parting shot" (columnists are called Zzars). I did think of "shalom", but settled for "ciao", which was in vogue, thanks to MTV and Channel [V] VJs. Anyway, the guys at zatang.com ended up publishing it as "chalo, see you soon".

Let us all spare a moment to remember the victims of September 11 2001 tragedy.

Shalom !

More -
The September 11 Digital Archive
On shalom
My old column at zatang.com