An Aaydle Mind

A favourite anecdote of my mother's is when a friend of Tamil writer Ki. Va. Jagannathan was living in Kolkata and missing home. He accidentally trod on a stranger's foot at a marketplace. "Muttaal!" the stranger exclaimed in Tamil. "Idiot!" Instead of being offended, the Tamilian was filled with joy on hearing Tamil outside its home, even if the speaker was abusing him!

Granted, I haven't been here long, but I did have a less intense version of that experience, when I asked the cashier at the canteen whether a particular dessert was vegetarian. "Muttai", he replied. (The lexical similarity to "Muttaal" is a coincidence.) "It contains eggs." Now he was depriving me of the custard but this was somehow still exciting to hear! An unlikely friendship seems on the cards.

I have been confined to the institute campus this week due to the small fact of a thunderstorm and flood, accompanied by red-alerts and notices of the second-highest rain in July in sixty years. (We are trying to find out which of the freshers is responsible for this disruption.) Of course, this does not stop brave joggers in raincoats as I observed last week, but for newbies trying to get accustomed to Mumbai germs, it is not the most preferable welcome.

Mumbaikars do use hacks to make life more efficient, but they seem to be missing a trick with not using dabara-tumblers, or similar apparatus, although the weather seems to be doing a decent job of cooling things down. Or, it is all a ploy to make drinks last longer and conversation (and hence research collaboration) happen. 

Speaking of hot beverages, TIFR's science popularisation initiative is called Chai and Why. It took me a moment to realise that Marathis pronounce "why" to rhyme with chai! (A similar phenomenon is the mobile network Idea being transliterated as "आयडिया / Aaydia" on adverts. This does reflect how they actually say it!) Hopefully I will be able to step outside and actually attend some of their events soon.