United Indian School, Abbasiya, Kuwait

Thanks for this great post!

People from kerala, especially those who live and work around Trivandrum are a highly conceited lot and will avoid anything that will even remotely make themselves lose face. Im surprised that she would put herself through this,( Im sure she knows how embarrassing she sounds!).

Im what people would (derisively) refer to as a "fraud mallu" (a mallu born and raised abroad, not fluent in malayalam and non observant of many facets of kerala culture),and the 7 years that I spent in Kerala was a real eye opener into the psyche of my 'native' cousins.

I can seriously vouch for the fact that,most native born mallus, harbour a very strongly felt deep seated secret desire to be able to speak fluently in English! I say secret because, for some reason, mallus are very afraid of being caught by their fellow native born mallus for doing the same!

When I went to college, some of the worst abuses , snide remarks etc, were reserved for me, my status as a "fraud mallu" being roughly analogous to that of a Jew in Nazi Germany. But what amazed me the most was the sight, (behind closed doors, or at night), when the very same people , who took such vehement pleasure in tormenting me, would come to me literally pleading for ways to improve their English!(spoken, they didnt care shit for writing in English). They usually came alone, away from their hound-pack aggregations that mallus are notorious for, and more often than not, they came drunk.

Anyone who (even) occasionally watches mallu movies will ascribe to the fact that characters who speak english in them are often portrayed in a very (usually negative) stereotypical way. They are either shown as being the haughty "snob" distant type , or the "pseudo intellectual" type or as being the helpless , "just fresh of the boat" Non resident Keralite type , being preyed upon by his/her 'worldly wise" native cousins. There is another actor, who is probably familiar to the mallus/frauds here , famous for delivering histrionic/bombastic dialogue (Just Mind It!, Shit!) in English. Never once will you ever see people speaking normally to one another in english, except maybe a couple of lines in a few, NRI-set romance movies.

This combination of a deep seated desire to communicate effectively and fluently in English , coupled with their inability to do so, has led to a lot of these people to develop severely hypocritical views on this issue, deriding and denouncing such people in public, while secretly lamenting their weakness in private.

I used to harbor feelings of terrible hatred for these people, but the more you come to understand them, the more i feel terribly sorry for them.

A famous Indian philosopher once remarked that "Kerala is a lunatic asylum". Sure as shit, it still is. All the social problems they go through there, the alcoholism, the suicides, the sex scandals, the child molestations, etc are all indicative of the fundamental weakness inherent in the psyche of the native born mallu. Of course there are progressive mallus, even native born, who are not what I described above, but they are just a few drops in the ocean of insanity that is contemporary Kerala, and even certain types of "progressive mallus" engage in this kind of lunatic behaviour once among the hound-pack of their native cousins.

i know i'll receive a lot of hate mail and denials/rebuttals on this issue, but everything i have said is true to my knowledge, and attests to 7 years of personal experience. These observations come from a person who possesses a unique vantage point of being both an "insider" and "outsider" to contemporary Kerala society.