column GOOD WORD Sabin Iqbal sabin.iqbal@gmail.com
It was a nightmare. The worst floods we have had for a long while. I mean, not in 100 years!
THE SHAPE OF WATER: FROM CLARA’S EYELASHES TO SURGING PERIYAR?
F
or me, personally, a significant bubble has burst. The bubble of Kerala being insulated from any form of devastating natural calamity, making it a unique place to live, which in the long bargain makes its people a tad lazy, cosy, potbellied rice-eaters of good-weather fellows. Rains and Malayalis always have a romantic relationship—be it the monsoon showers keeping its date with the reopening of the schools after the summer break or with Clara, with slender beauty with dark, dreamy eyes dripping raindrops, Padmarajan’s creative contribution to augment Malayali’s hidden notions of amorous fantasy. We have never looked at the rains as a monster, forget the floods in 1924 or the mighty deluge in the 14th century which is believed to have wiped out Muziris and caused Kochi to emerge. For us, the rains are part of our being alive. The rains, in a way, are our whipping boys. We blame them for everything—we have always found
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BRAND KERALA
fault with either too much of it or too little of it. We have long stopped our habit of cultivation. We have found better, albeit more menacing, use for our agricultural tools. We have contributed willingly to the long line of migrant workers—a
THE RAINS, IN A WAY, ARE OUR WHIPPING BOYS. WE BLAME THEM FOR EVERYTHING.
unique set of labour force who turn their blood into sweat once they cross their borders but seldom work at home. Let’s blame it on the rains—for making us a luxuriant people, a temporary people, an incorrigibly argumentative, politically hyperactive, conservatively
SEPTEMBER 2018
progressive people, who love any degree of pointless discussion, debates and deliberations of party politics. The rains have also made us imbeciles and wool-gatherers who have been hoodwinked by the unscrupulous for their habitual acts of looting. In fact, what’s Kerala, especially in comparison with other states beyond the Ghatts? A sliver of fragile land, tucked between the Sahyadri range and the coast of the Arabian Sea. Do we matter, if not for our globetrotting adventures? It has to be assumed that when the Yavanas and the Chinese travellers came more than 3000 years ago, our geographical shape would have been different. We as a people would have been different in our behavioural patterns and cultural moorings. As some one wrote, we are more of water than of land. We are a patina of people on the water. One of the books which have fascinated me recently is Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, a spellbinding account of the lives of non-
