Topic started by rjay on Tue Feb 15 11:45:06 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.
Thamizh Culture - A humorous look - Part 5
Thamizhs are great sea-farers. Well did I say,
'are'. I am sorry, that should read 'were'.
Because Thamizhs stopped sea-faring approximately
many years ago. The closest we nowadays get near the sea is
Marina beach. Some people however get into the waves
when pushed by friends fastly. Of course an exemption to this
are Fishermen who have to get into the waves daily, to earn their
daily fish.
But before this sea-phobia set in, Thamizhs went all over the world
to even Java (not the programming language, you nerd, it
is an old island, where Thamizhs went, I dont know where it is
now or even whether it is still there, because I have not read the
geography book. ALl the geography, history and science and math
I knew I learnt through Thamizh Literature)
Yeah Thamizhs went to Java and Sumatra , malaysia, south africa
and kandi kathirkamam and built great temples, which are cleaner and bhakthier
than mainland temples. To this day, you can see
Thamizh people living in these places, are much more proud about
Thamizh culture than we are and buy more original tamil movie
cassettes than we do. They also invite S.V.Sekar (sorry
for the wrong spelling, Sekar) and vichitra regularly.
Thamizhs from one of these
islands, called Ceylon or Ilangai, played a key role in spreading
Thamizh culture back to mainland Thamizhs using latest technology.
You ask what? They set up a radio broadcast and constantly
streamed Thamizh culture into Thamizh nadu in the form
of old and new cinema songs, while the corresponding radio
stations in Thamizh nadu were foolishly inviting scientists
and university professors for giving educative lectures
in topics like 'how to prevent heart diseases' and the need
for exercise and
also trying to help farmers by giving agricultural tips
and advice. Who heard these, anyway?
Because of the uninterrupted stream of songs most Thamizh's by birth
became well developed in the art of 'passive listening'.
Even, when the radio was not playing, the songs would hum
themselves in the mind without any effort, like a
mini-broadcasting station. What a blessing! You could hear the
songs in your mind even when you were in a class room or
exam hall!
However, the ceylon radio did much more than passive
broadcast of film songs. They invented a lot of active programmes.
For example the broadcast schedule of a typical Monday would
go something like this:
7:00 Pongum poompunal - which is new film songs
8:00 Thirai isaiyil ragangal - film songs based on the same raga
9:00 Thirai malar - film songs starting with same first letter
10:00 Thirappookal - film songs starting with the same second letter
11:00 Paatukku Paatu - film song for film song, like pazhikkup pazhi
12:00 Oru padappadalkal - songs from the same movie.
1:00 Iru padappadalkal - songs from two movies, alternating
and so on.
You can say, they did nothing but constantly broadcast songs.
No, no, they had advertisements
in between. Most of these advertisements were based on songs, also.
By attracting and keeping the attention of the young kids (yeah, you
could hear 3 year-olds singing raunchy numbers like 'palingilinal
oru maaligai' or 'pachchai-kkili muthucharam' and emotional
numbers like 'enakkaro kaaadhali irukkindral' with such an emotion),
by attracting and keeping the attention of the young kids,
the radio pioneers kept them
away from evils of the world, like drugs, gang formation and
socializing, playing on the outside, physical exercise and
thinking deeply for even short periods of time.
If by accident a harmful explorative thought came up in the kid
like, 'angae ponal enna aagum?' the song 'ponal pogattum poda!'
would immediately come to the rescue with full backing music and
prevent the child from taking any harmful action. Some gifted kids even
thought, talked and breathed songs, so if you asked a question
they would answer using film songs, in a raga suiting the
mood of the topic and time of the day.
For example if you wanted
them to say one, two, three, in preparation for the preschool interview,
which has become highly competitive nowadays, they would reply in singing-
'onnu rendu moonu naalu anju aaru
endha ooru enna peru marandhupochchu'
from a Rajini starrer, the song being one of IR's greatest hits.
If you wanted them to recite, aa-na aa-vanna, they would proceed
undaunted and recite, the famous song in a Gemini movie -
aa-na aa - dum tadaree tadaree tadaree (music)
aaa-vanna aaaa - dum tadarin tadarin tadarin (music)
and so on upto akkanna and they would end with the same
eerie laughter, laughed by PBS or Gemini!
(DISCLAIMER: People with weak hearts or those suffering from
'not-able-to-laugh-at-myself-aiyah' syndrome should skip the
next paragraph)
By training Thamizh people when they were young, these
media breakthrough gave a strong
foundation to the growth of the hearts and minds of these young
men and women. They made sure that
later in life, these young people would learn all latest technology
and set up great web sites of the world to continue the tradition of
song-collection, song-recollection, song-discussion, song-dissection and also
song broadcast (realaudio). Of course the TFM group would build upon the past
further by extending the useful discussions to IR-ARR comparison,
IR-bashing, ARR-bashing wars and so on,
which was not even attempted by Ceylon Radio! After all, when
a tiger can jump 8 feet,
the cub can jump 16 feet, is it not (even though, personally I feel
a healthy tiger must be able to do much more than that)?
On the contrary, has anybody heard any website that does
discussion on vayalum vaazhvum or ilakkiya
neram or ilamthendral? It is because, before vayalum
vaazhvum started, pongum poompunal would start and that
would not end until ilamthendral ended. How are we supposed
to listen to these ill-fated programmes? Only three people
regularly heard them at all. The author, the reader and the audio-engineer.
Still, there were some other harmful practices remaining in the culture
that tried to improve critical thinking. For example, the debating
culture, called pattimandram (not grandma-mandram, this is not paa but pa).
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