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In our high school geography lessons we were taught about the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats and their acute differences.
We lived all our lives in towns bordering the Eastern Ghats and were attached to them, naturally.
These ghats actually refer to mountain ranges...I don't know why they are termed ghats. The only ghats that I recall visiting are the scenic Ghats of Benares on Ganges...in particular the Dasasvamedh Ghat (the ghat of ten race horses and their sacrifice that I didn't see there). But I saw the Arti performed there by our incipient PM along with his retinue last night on TV. I happened to be watching the show along with my sambandhi (father of my D-i-L) who is an orthodox South Indian Brahmin (unlike me). And he was thrilled and said:
"For the first time I am seeing a PM of India with sacred ashes smeared on his brow and a tilak on his forehead"
Anyway, we read in our school that while Western Ghats are a contiguous unbroken range of evergreen mountains standing like a sheer wall facing the Arabian Sea, our Eastern Ghats are for the most part isolated hillocks standing apart like bread crumbs in tomato soup. They are often away from Bay of Bengal except in Vizagh where I pretended to study physics for a wasted 7 years. A green hillock actually juts into the sea there and is called Dolphin's Nose. None of us saw a dolphin then and so we didn't quite appreciate the metaphor...indeed my MD Uncle who showed it to me on my first visit to Vizagh told me that it looked like the nose of a puppy that was the pet of the wife of one King George, the British discoverer-surveyor of that lovely beach.
Most of the hillocks in our Eastern Ghats are easily scalable by amateur climbers, and whenever there was a single hillock or a group with greenery on them, temples were built and steps laid and snaky ghat roads hewed. There are several famous temple-towns by these shrines, like Tirupati, Simhachalam, Annavaram in what is, for the moment, still undivided AP.
And our ancestors had a liking for these hillocks enveloping them. They are called Konda(s) in Telugu. Konda is not a huge mountain, which is referred to as a Parvatam; nor is it a tiny mound which is called a Thippa. It is in between...say their geometric mean. And whenever possible our folks visited these hill-temples and prayed there. And thus hillocks (kondas) entered our terminology and gave rise to various affectionate metaphors like:
1. Konda Jalubu (Hill Cold): This doesn't refer to the temperature on our hilltops but to the severe cold in our heads that results in noses running for weeks together making our noses as red as that of 'Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer'. It is not the fleeting cold that goes away after a few sneezes, but goes on and on like our elections. We have a saying that one should never sit to the right of a sewing woman nor to the left of a woman seized by this Konda Jalubu. You know why...most of our womenfolk are right-handed and so knit with their right hands and blow their noses with their left hands. I don't know if our left-handed batting kin like Sourav-da, the Prince of Cal, blows his nose with his right hand.
2. Konda Gali (Hill Wind): This wind is not cool. It is the hot summer wind that lifts up our animal spirits. Anything that does it, like our recent Tsunamo, can be termed Konda Gali.
3. Konda Guruthu (Hill Mark): This is anything that helps us remember or trace our way through unknown territories. I think early climbers on our hillocks marked certain features on their way up so that they could easily retrace their footsteps without losing their way. Metaphorically, anything that serves as a mnemonic feature can be called a Konda Guruthu, like the election symbol for our illiterates...like my son who couldn't read his mother tongue and so was at a loss in the election booth. I read that most ladies of UP villages recently were told to vote for Modi since he would give jobs to all their kids; but they were not told that lotus was his election symbol and so returned home pressing any button that looked like Modijee.
4. Konda Mangali (Hill Barber): This refers to barbers sitting on our hill-shrines and fleecing their innocent public who want to have their heads tonsured. These barbers are always in such a hurry not to lose custom to their competitors sitting by their side that they do a shabby job and the devout have to go to their family barbers after they returned home to get their crops rectified. The metaphor is to anyone who does a shabby job...like that District Magistrate of Kashi who was acting as its Returning Officer recently...I am told that he is an IITian (Roorkee). That shows; not that our KGPian performed any better in the recent elections. Nor even that IITian (Bombay)...uparwala unko chaddi phar ke leliya...it is just a coincidence that all these three studied Mechanical Engineering...they should have studies physics like me...
5. Konda Naluka (Hill Tongue): This refers to the suspended soft palate inside our upper jaw. It is obvious why it has a metaphorical hill in its name but I guess it called a tongue not because it performs the eating functions of the tongue but verbal as in 'mother tongue' (it perfects articulation of our speech, wobbling according to need, struck by the wind exhaled by our lungs, especially if we are trying to speak German...I don't know why anyone should, but). Its medical name is 'uvula'...there is no truth in the calumny that the only Sardarjee medical student at Vizagh in the 1960s lost his prestigious Swaminathan Gold Medal in Anatomy in his viva, he confusing it with a similar-sounding gentle organ somewhere else.
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In our high school geography lessons we were taught about the Western Ghats and Eastern Ghats and their acute differences.
We lived all our lives in towns bordering the Eastern Ghats and were attached to them, naturally.
These ghats actually refer to mountain ranges...I don't know why they are termed ghats. The only ghats that I recall visiting are the scenic Ghats of Benares on Ganges...in particular the Dasasvamedh Ghat (the ghat of ten race horses and their sacrifice that I didn't see there). But I saw the Arti performed there by our incipient PM along with his retinue last night on TV. I happened to be watching the show along with my sambandhi (father of my D-i-L) who is an orthodox South Indian Brahmin (unlike me). And he was thrilled and said:
"For the first time I am seeing a PM of India with sacred ashes smeared on his brow and a tilak on his forehead"
Anyway, we read in our school that while Western Ghats are a contiguous unbroken range of evergreen mountains standing like a sheer wall facing the Arabian Sea, our Eastern Ghats are for the most part isolated hillocks standing apart like bread crumbs in tomato soup. They are often away from Bay of Bengal except in Vizagh where I pretended to study physics for a wasted 7 years. A green hillock actually juts into the sea there and is called Dolphin's Nose. None of us saw a dolphin then and so we didn't quite appreciate the metaphor...indeed my MD Uncle who showed it to me on my first visit to Vizagh told me that it looked like the nose of a puppy that was the pet of the wife of one King George, the British discoverer-surveyor of that lovely beach.
Most of the hillocks in our Eastern Ghats are easily scalable by amateur climbers, and whenever there was a single hillock or a group with greenery on them, temples were built and steps laid and snaky ghat roads hewed. There are several famous temple-towns by these shrines, like Tirupati, Simhachalam, Annavaram in what is, for the moment, still undivided AP.
And our ancestors had a liking for these hillocks enveloping them. They are called Konda(s) in Telugu. Konda is not a huge mountain, which is referred to as a Parvatam; nor is it a tiny mound which is called a Thippa. It is in between...say their geometric mean. And whenever possible our folks visited these hill-temples and prayed there. And thus hillocks (kondas) entered our terminology and gave rise to various affectionate metaphors like:
1. Konda Jalubu (Hill Cold): This doesn't refer to the temperature on our hilltops but to the severe cold in our heads that results in noses running for weeks together making our noses as red as that of 'Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer'. It is not the fleeting cold that goes away after a few sneezes, but goes on and on like our elections. We have a saying that one should never sit to the right of a sewing woman nor to the left of a woman seized by this Konda Jalubu. You know why...most of our womenfolk are right-handed and so knit with their right hands and blow their noses with their left hands. I don't know if our left-handed batting kin like Sourav-da, the Prince of Cal, blows his nose with his right hand.
2. Konda Gali (Hill Wind): This wind is not cool. It is the hot summer wind that lifts up our animal spirits. Anything that does it, like our recent Tsunamo, can be termed Konda Gali.
3. Konda Guruthu (Hill Mark): This is anything that helps us remember or trace our way through unknown territories. I think early climbers on our hillocks marked certain features on their way up so that they could easily retrace their footsteps without losing their way. Metaphorically, anything that serves as a mnemonic feature can be called a Konda Guruthu, like the election symbol for our illiterates...like my son who couldn't read his mother tongue and so was at a loss in the election booth. I read that most ladies of UP villages recently were told to vote for Modi since he would give jobs to all their kids; but they were not told that lotus was his election symbol and so returned home pressing any button that looked like Modijee.
4. Konda Mangali (Hill Barber): This refers to barbers sitting on our hill-shrines and fleecing their innocent public who want to have their heads tonsured. These barbers are always in such a hurry not to lose custom to their competitors sitting by their side that they do a shabby job and the devout have to go to their family barbers after they returned home to get their crops rectified. The metaphor is to anyone who does a shabby job...like that District Magistrate of Kashi who was acting as its Returning Officer recently...I am told that he is an IITian (Roorkee). That shows; not that our KGPian performed any better in the recent elections. Nor even that IITian (Bombay)...uparwala unko chaddi phar ke leliya...it is just a coincidence that all these three studied Mechanical Engineering...they should have studies physics like me...
5. Konda Naluka (Hill Tongue): This refers to the suspended soft palate inside our upper jaw. It is obvious why it has a metaphorical hill in its name but I guess it called a tongue not because it performs the eating functions of the tongue but verbal as in 'mother tongue' (it perfects articulation of our speech, wobbling according to need, struck by the wind exhaled by our lungs, especially if we are trying to speak German...I don't know why anyone should, but). Its medical name is 'uvula'...there is no truth in the calumny that the only Sardarjee medical student at Vizagh in the 1960s lost his prestigious Swaminathan Gold Medal in Anatomy in his viva, he confusing it with a similar-sounding gentle organ somewhere else.
...Posted by Ishani
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