Pattar Press
Today, I thought of starting a series of posts on my family members, arms length and leg’s length (extended ones), not to be mistaken with the ones you would like to kick around like Floran. Our family is probably a big Octopus (not Paul of course). They were not clairvoyants, but did manage to make predictions on things like elections, food tastes, gender of the yet to be born baby, movies and a whole host of other things including outcome of cricket matches with consistent failures. Infact, the predictability of their failure rates is as high as 99% with a confidence level of more than 95%. However, returning to the Octopus, our family tree from my great grandfather would probably fill a few 100 square feet of space what with each of the children managing to cross the 6 limit barrier. Not sure, who decided the 6 limit barrier, but it worked in reverse. Any person with lesser than 6 children were rendered outcasts. To this effect, my parents lost out on the 6 club by 3.
One of the intersting things to be noted about the typical Palaghat Iyer clan (Pattar) is the naming convention. As most of you have been called at some point of time or the other, PIs are normaly called as Pattars by the Malayalees who believe that we lost our way and landed in their home town and completely usurped their seats and claimed feifdom to Palaghat. There are a lot of places in Palaghat that we call our own and to reinforce the patriotism we have actually managed to include the villages in our names. And hence we have people called Tayankolankarai S Mahavdevan affectionately called TRM or Tatamangalam R Srinivasan. Of course, when these people land up in the US counsulate for visas to visit their sons or daughters they end up having an argument with the application form. And herein the proverb “Pen is mightier than sword” takes a big beating with TRS pulling his hair apart in deciding which of the boxes he would put his 3 names and finally shredding the form with his pocket knife specially made for betel nut hacking (Vethalla cheeval)
Of course, the TRS family has things easier at the home front. When Mrs TRS delivers their first child in the same village, the child is aptly called TSR. The second and third names keep getting substituted and this of course has been their for generations. The grandfather is called Srinivasan Ramanathan, the father is therefore called Ramanathan Srinivasan and the son quite obvious Srinivasan Ramanathan. Creativity was not one of the favourite point of the TRS clan. Of course, when it comes to the daughter things change a bit. The first daughter has the paternal’s grandmother’s name and the second daughter maternal grandmother’s name and if there is more than 2 daughters then the grandma’s sisters begin their sojourn into the family nomenclature. So When Srinivasan Ramanthan and Alamelu Ramanathan have a granddaughter, she is called Alamelu and when they have another granddaughter she becomes Pattammal who is their in law or in this case sammandhi.
However, it should be noted that the TRS clan had a different sort of creativity in them. This became evident again in the naming of people. As you would imagine a marriage ceremony that needed to be attended by the octopus and its tentacles would be a nightmare. Imagine the priest calling for the girl’s father by his name Ramanathan and 5 of the namesake turn up at the madapam. This had to be nipped in the bud and the clan came to its creative best. Nicknames were the order of the day. So each name was shortened to its minmalistic length and a chi, chu or bi (bee) was added to it. Krishnan became Kicha, Ramanthan became Ramu, Nathan, Ambi, Venkatraman became Venky, Venkacham, Veeramani, mani and so on. Sarswathi became Sachu, Alamelu became ammu and so on. Sometimes, nicknames did not have direct meeting to the actual name. They became a dervative or the relation, work or a common activity. In our family, one of the most creative name was for my uncle who had a penchant for wearing anything green. It is said that his wardrobe sported roughly 60% green shirts and he was therefore affectionately called Pachai anna (Green brother of the elder variety) since he was my mother”s brother. There were other interesting names such as mani, picchai, ambi and so on. These of course had a different reason of being formed and i shall brief you on the rationale of the same next time around
