Kerala Stories

I've been searching for 'Dhana dhanya sasialatha', a Malayalam version of a Bengali song for several years now. My late mother used to sing it but no one I asked seems to remember it now.  The song is an adaptation of  a Bengali original written by Dwijendralal Roy in the late 19th or early 20th century and which is still popular.  The Malayalam version seems to be lost. Some people say it used to be played on All India Radio in the 1950s and 60s when Kerala state was newly formed. Others say it used to be sung in school assemblies even till the 1970s. But I haven't been able to get the lyrics or a recording or a reference.  If you come across it or know of it, do let me know, it would be wonderful to recapture the memoty. Thanks! Here's a video with both versions.

Over the past few days, I've seen variants of a post on the impermanence of a 'permanent address'. Through the analogy of an address, the posts talk about the futility of trying to hold on to certainties in a changing world. I agree. But I also believe that - at least for us in India - the liberalisation of the last 30 years has accelerated that change and permanently altered the status quo. Over the last couple of years, I completed an exercise that many families in Kerala undertake at some point -- creating a family tree and history. Sifting through anecdotes, dimly or often mis-remembered by older relatives, and scouring available sources for credible facts and figures to validate often apocryphal claims, I put together a timeline for my parent's families going back several generations. It was a bit of a vanity trip, of course. Like many families in our situation, our family trees feature chieftains, royals, vagabonds, layabouts, achievers, and a large number of peop...