Kasaragodu Malayalam - i

I spoke my mother tongue Malayalam until I was 4 years old (according to my mother) then switched to Kannada. The legacy of which could be seen in the fact that I can speak with kids below four years old only in Malayalam and also with all animals (Need not be universal truth as my born Kannadiga brother also has the same habit). Of course, it can be also said that the four years threshold is in place because the children above that age have the language skills that exceed mine (in Malayalam).

After the birth of my daughter I have this dilemma whether my natural instincts to speak in Malayalam to babies should be given free run or should be curtailed. I have recently read that if the kids are bilingual before the age of five their communication skills would be hampered as they grow up. Strictly speaking, I wasn't bilingual when I reached the age of five. I switched from one language to another thus I was a serial monolingual. But I was never satisfied with my grasp over any languages that I can read, write and speak (Kannada, English, Hindi, Tulu and Malayalam). So, I thought of speaking with my daughter in Malayalam until she becomes five years old.

However, my wife read somewhere that bilinguals have better chances avoiding Alzheimer's. She thought it would be better if we turned our daughter bilingual. So, I switched over to Kannada with my daughter. But here comes the problem.

Kannada, as I learnt it, is bookish or standard dialect. I am observing it's not best suited to speak with babies. Malayalam, be it standard dialect or Kasaragodu dialect, is an amazing short cut language. I suppose the late standardization of the language has removed many agglutinations/suffixes from Malayalam and is closer to spoken dialects. I do know many of the Kannada spoken dialects have shorter morphology. However, the early standardization has left the standard dialect with long agglutinations. I think there was a recent survey (in Outlook Magazine I suppose) where it was reported that Malayalis have the best grasp over the standard language and Kannadigas the worst among primary school students in South India. Probably, gulf between standard language and spoken language explains this difference between Malayalis and Kannadigas.

Weakest Nazis

Other day, a newspaper report on a suicide caught my eye. He was a Telugu and 22 years old. The background was he had incurred a huge debt to get his sister married off. He was unable to pay them back and creditors were on his back. He committed suicide and curiously wrote a letter that person should be born either rich or poor. There was no life for a middle class person like him.

Now, dowry is very rampant among Telugus of all classes. From his letter, I"m guessing, he meant rich can afford to pay the dowry and poor because of the obviousness of their poverty are not severely constrained or he could have shamelessly run away from his duty and nobody would have talked. I thought he was not complaining about the irrationality of the dowry system but as a middle class person he was ruing that he was not able to maintain the certain standard of the society. At the end of the day, it was a typical suicide of a person with a sense of failure.

As a middle class by birth person, I always thought I had the best possible class but not a best possible society. It was a society lot better than what all my ancestors inherited but still a society in transition. Though legally it had made all the constraints (including dowry) underground, many people haven't liberated themselves and thus keeping many others in check. Sometimes it strikes you that many don't break any illegal practices because they are very humble people. They just don't want to make others look morally corrupt.

Coming to the suicide letter, I felt bit uncomfortable about the "poor" part. As far as I know, they too try to maintain the standards set by the rich and the middle class. My former housemaid's eldest daughter was killed by her in-laws for not bringing enough dowry. The mother wanted justice for her daughter but the relatives made her to see the pointlessness of the effort. The husband is supposedly happily married now.

Vegetarianism = Discrimination

Via Pharyngula

Even if it's not religiously sanctioned (like in India) the unnatural tendency towards vegetarianism brings out irrational antipathy towards normal eaters. The annoying rejections one encounters during rental house hunt in India is a case in point.

On a different note, Gandhi needed endorsement for his Jain influenced vegetarianism and non-violence principles (as true Indian identity markers) from the people who he thought had reached the pinnacle of human civilization. He obviously found his support from similar faddist crackpot quarters in the UK.

Irrelevant Past - i

A hilarious article in BBC

He believes that the voters' preference for emotional engagement over reasonable argument has allowed the Republican Party to blind them to their own real interests.

The Republicans have learnt how to stoke up resentment against the patronising liberal elite, all those do-gooders who assume they know what poor people ought to be thinking.

Right-wing politics has become a vehicle for channelling this popular anger against intellectual snobs. The result is that many of America's poorest citizens have a deep emotional attachment to a party that serves the interests of its richest.

Reminded me the election during my High School days for the post of school representative. I was campaigning for my friend. Maybe we were part of obedient students. Our opponents just spread the message that we would arrange "special classes"( classes for the subjects that couldn't be completed during school working days and hence to be accommodated during weekends). They won a resounding victory.

Sense of Humour -ii

It beats me that a beautiful story of how a racist attitude leads to redemption could even be selected for national awards. Or was that a moral story about Nigerian drug dealers? Do they really care? Anyway, whatever it is, its open dialogues that go easy on brain makes an anti-subtle person like me proud.

Protagonist: I'm different
Agency manager: I can see you are different
:
Protagonist: I'll rule the fashion world
Agency manager: I can see you'll rule the fashion world

A lot better than Malayali ultra-subtle non-dialoguers.

Devolution - v

Two more papers closely related the one I discussed before have appeared on Science Daily.

The first one is about self-control. According to the study it's contagious. If you think someone with great self-control then you can imbibe that quality. The opposite is also true. I'm not so sure, I suppose that requires you hold that somebody as a model. But that is not very easy to do. Probably, the second paper explains why.

According to this paper, there are people driven by fun and there are people driven by achievement. People driven by fun excel in non-competitive environment and fail in competitive setup. Opposite is true for people driven by achievement. That is a troubling finding. My understanding is that people are driven for fun (dopamine). Any disciplined behaviour is a cultivated one. The losers are the ones without a proper cultivated self-control and discipline.

The way I understood the study (so did Maju), people who love fun and people who love achievement belong to different worlds. 'fun' and 'achievement' are two independent and innate fundamental drives. It's not like all roads lead to dopamine.

Confusing times.

Notes to manju - ii

The humiliation of the female sex is an essential feature of civilization as well as barbarianism. The only difference is that the civilised system raises to a compound, equivocal, ambiguous, hypocritical mode of existence every vice that barbarity practices in the simple form... Nobody is punished more for keeping woman a slave than man himself.

Karl Marx in The Holy Family

I wonder that suffering man belongs to which class.