I am a North Indian who has been staying in the South. My dad came to Trivandrum, Kerala with some of his friends to see if it was a good place for starting marble business. He was very young then [He would have been around my age now!!!], I admire his guts to venture into an unknown city at the extreme end of the country to be an entrepreneur and to be the first in the family to do that. This was sometime in 1984 [Yikes, why did it have to be that year], Trivandrum was very different then than from what you see it today.
While they loved the greenery and the sea, they saw almost no men in the streets with pants. It amused them to see people in “lungis” because back home, men wore lungis in their houses only. Almost nobody understood English or hindi in TVM then, so gestures were the only communication medium. Food was a big problem, 2 days with Kerala rice and sambhar [after 2.5 days of train food], they yearned for some chappathis. After looking at several places, they found a place that would serve chappathis. They ordered more than 40 chappathis and the waiters and owners were way too shocked. Dad and uncles still laugh over that incident. While the chappathis were no where good, that place became a regular joint. People at the restaurant didn’t express shock and awe later when asked to bring 50 chappathis. Back then, there were no marble godowns/offices, most people got marble/granite from cochin for construction.
Five of them [Dad and 4 of his friends] started their business as partners and called it Friends Marble Emporium.
After a month, Dad moved to TVM with mom, me and my sister. Mom had a tough time talking to the landlady, worst was going out to buy groceries and other household things. She had to take care not to finish any of the dals [pulses], masalas, spices etc completely, she would take some of it as a sample to the shopkeeper and ask him to get her some of that. Funny, something like you take two cards and do a match-match by looking at both. Things you do to overcome communication problems!
My sister and I joined nursery and picked up the local language quite fast. We went to Rajasthan and Delhi every year during vacations and we were quite amused to see some of the differences. And as kids one of the most often asked question was what we preferred - the south or the north. In Kerala, people dressed up very simple. There were many instances when we would mistake a customer for a worker. During weddings, women wore gaudy looking silk sarees and were decked with piles of gold attaching no concerns to the overall look. And they wore slippers. Men wore lungis even for weddings. It’s only later that we got to know that lungis were the equivalent of dhothis in the South.
Women washed clothes by flinging the clothes against a washing stone in the south and in the north they would wash clothes by bashing the clothes using a bat. The south Indian temples required men to be in lungis only [You don’t say topless for men, do you?] to gain an entrance in the temple. In Trivandrum every kid had tuitions, in the north tuitions meant the student was weak and needed assistance outside his/her school.
Things have changed a lot in the last two decades. A lot for the better. It is still very amusing to hear notions that people have about the opposite end. When I went to Rajasthan recently, I enjoyed listening to people talk about South India. Some facts and many stories ;)
Its even more funny listening to some of them talk about computers and technology. I kind of love our country for the diversity. While on one end we are advancing, learning and growing in terms of technology, on the other end there are people expressing wonder and shock about the things they see. When one of them described this thing, [which happened to be a palm] that he happened to see and hear about, as a miracle, a saadu’s magic gadget or something, I couldn’t help smiling. I was in love with their innocence and their interpretations of what they saw around. Even more with their openness about wanting to hear and understand it.
[Desi?]