It is rather amazing, how being a familiar stranger to your roots can estrange you to your people more than anything else. You are the immediate object of criticism, sometimes even scorn. Now, I don’t intend to be offensive to my acquaintances or to the particular people I sought, foolishly of course, to generalize, I cannot however refrain from being irked at the almost hypocritical cynicism of the Malayali.
The Malayali is cynical out of heredity. It is in their innate nature, in all the people of the regional and cultural community. On the bright side, this cynicism and the subsequent liking for the sarcastic provides great scope for humour, the Malayali is also averse to being at the receiving end of any criticism.
Now the reason I came to this line of thought is simply the fact that I sat a post-graduate class where the lecturer was, with reason enough, cynical of the cynics and a little more than half the class consisted of the Malayalis. And shame upon the Malayali who is inclined to accept what she felt was the truth, as an outsider might see it.
Persecution, in the form of a good-talking-to. “How can you criticize/hate Kerala when you are a part of it yourself?” Of course I blame the fact that I did most of my growing up outside the so-called “Malayaliness” and that my family, immediate and extended are more outspoken, accepting and free than most Malayali families I’ve met while retaining the classic cynicism and quirky sense of humour. The point of debate being that the Malayali is generally cynical, critical, pessimistic and arrogant.
While I can only imagine how it must have offended the “people from the hard core mallu land”, as the lecturer felt like labelling us, I don’t see why the inherently efficient critic failed to notice the probable honesty of it. The essential Mallu in the class is always ready to laugh at his classmate’s accident and foolishnes, remembers to pull his leg about it and even point out where he went wrong. But hey, did they try to point out how the correction could be done? Did they attempt to know why an unfamiliar, and in some respects peculiar name came to be? I heard one girl happily include the various sobriquets of the land she came from when introducing herself, but did she ask the Manipuri girl sitting next to her what her place is all about? Its also rather disturbing how the students have all been taking a keen interest in knowing each other, but the mallu community prefers to stay within their comfort zones, in a language that is mutually understandable than try and learn another one from their classmates. They’d rather be in places where they can get by with English than learn Hindi or the native tongue so that they can learn the place they have come to better. They’d definitely prefer staying a ‘Malayali’ and carrying the tag with them throughout than try to break out of the conventional image attached to them. And woe betide the one who tries to defy the norms. Yet they wonder why certain adjectives are affixed to them by most everyone who knows only the basic Malayali.
In defence, I’d like to say that the mallus have probably made the most effort to adjust to an alien atmosphere, although they are drawn to keep to the safety zone as far as cultural and linguistic issues are concerned. Despite their initial reluctance to become familiar with the ‘outsider’, mallus make great mates to hang out with once the ice is broken. And once they shed their cynicism and pessimism, there’s rarely a human being you’ll meet who is as humane as the people who are ‘pessimistic, critical, cynical and arrogant.’
And as a mallu, who doesn’t quite fit the image of a classic Malayali all I ask is the Mallu to turn that cynicism on themselves for a while, find out why people are pessimistic about them, critically analyze the situation and find the perfect solution to being acceptable.