CHENNAI IS an oven in April, a furnace in May. No afternoon sea breeze respite for inner city dwellers either, the concrete jungle seals all entries. The baked roads and tree-robbed avenues are a blur of dust and traffic fumes. Splashing your face for the hundredth time with warm water from the tap, you wonder yet again just how you are going to survive the cruel weeks to come.
"Anything to distract me as I'm broiled alive," my cousin sighs. I respond hesitantly, "Coconut water? Buttermilk? Watermelon juice? New mocktails for the season bursting into print everyday? Khadi? Mangalgiri? Kanchi cotton? We are swamped by summer sales." Her scorn is too deep for rebuttal. But she says pensively, "Remember how we learnt rhymes during summer vacations? We didn't notice the heat then, did we."
Those were the days when our canny Grandma set the dozen children of her joint family to learn long verses by heart through the blazing noons of May. The best recitation of each day won a fistful of sugar candy. Often Grandma herself reeled off riddle rhymes, and taught indoor games, each with its own string of verses — "pallankuzhi" on wooden board with slots for the shell counters, "ammanai" to juggle little silver balls, and "othaiya-rettaiya", a guessing game with tamarind seeds. We built up our stock of poetry (!) then. Our `era' was innocent of television and computer screens. Plays and `talkies' were rare treats. The mandatory family entertainment was to yank some child out of the throng, and have him or her recite Kural and Athi Choodi, or the rousing verses of Subrahmanya Bharati. (more)
In the same issue S. Muthiah writes about a man who has developed a version of Scrabble in Tamil. While English has only 26 letters,
Thamizh has 247 - and anyone thinking of developing the game in other vernaculars will have to deal with 468 (excluding compound letters) in Hindi, 385 in Bengali 523, or so in Telugu, 507, or so in Kannada, 68 in Malayalam, and 374 in each of Gujarati and Marathi!(more)