Tamil agrahara house, Dakshinachitra#
In addition to the beautiful setting, the party organisers had provided a palmist, a mehndi-painter. . .
(These are not my hands! I asked for something simple and got a very busy teardrop shape that covers my right palm. There’s a page on mehndi / henna here.)
. . . and a practitioner of kili josiyam fortune-telling. A parrot (kili) chooses a card from a stack, based on your name and perhaps some other details. The practitioner then interprets the card that the parrot has chosen. Looking around the Net, I was astonished and delighted to find Cyber Kili Josiyam. Try it, and don’t worry if you don’t know your birth star. The parrot will forgive you.
One of the interesting things about the party was that I met a Tamil Jain. I knew that, centuries ago, there was a strong Jain influence in parts of Tamil Nadu, but I had assumed that it had died out. She told me that there are about one million Tamil Jains today - out of a population of about sixty-two million.
Some beautiful pictures of India, taken by Michael Cross, a physics professor who, appropriately, teaches a course on Chaos Theory. My part of the country is represented by pictures of Tiruchirappali and Tanjore. Very characteristic South Indian temple architecture.
Tiruchirappali was too hard for the British to say, so they called it Trichinopoly. When they went away, the original name was put back, but no one wants to bother with such a long name. So everyone calls it Trichy. Tamil has too many syllables, even for the Tamils. That’s why it’s a classic example of diglossia, a language which has two different versions, the formal one and the one you actually speak. I have a book on this subject: Diglossia: A study of the theory with application to Tamil, by Francis Britto. I really am going to read it one of these days. . .
Hindi film villain: I am the Godfather’s grandfather!
(the original line, in Hinglish: mei~ godfather ka grandfather hu~!)