On being a "Mallu"

If someone asks me, “What about you do you try to hide the most at your workplace?”, my answer would be, “The fact that I am a MALLU!”

“Dude, it is so obvious in your looks and your accent is typical MALLU! What the f**k are you trying to hide here?” I suppose this would be my friend Handel’s comment, if I tell him that.

Deliberately or not so deliberately I keep trying to conceal my mallu identity whenever I move out of my room here in Chennai. Here are a couple of examples:
I regularly buy two newspapers a day –“The Hindu” and “Malayala Manorama”. I make sure that the Malayalam daily is well concealed inside the English one.

I never move out of my room in a ‘lungi’ or a dhoti/veshti/mundu (doesn’t imply that I go around nude)

What a Hypocrite.. All this is while more than 90% of my friends are mallus and I enjoy everything mallu – be it the food, entrainment, news or the land.

But why do I try to conceal that identity of mine? Is being a mallu something bad? That is not something that I decided upon. It just so happened that I was born to a Mallu couple, who work and reside in Kerala. I spent 20 long years of my life there inculcating all the malluness (both +ve and –ve) without my knowledge.
The non-mallus out there, most of the time, look at us with apathy. Why? May be because we “infest” all places and try to boss around. Let us not, even for a second, think that these “non-mallus” are racist. It is more because of the way we treat them in their land. We fail to respect the local customs and traditions and understand the sentiments of the land.

In our accented ‘Ingleesh’ we go around telling people that our ‘grand fathurs lénd ingleesh frum thi inglessh peepil” evoking peels of laughter from every “coorner”. To tell you the truth we never understand what you are laughing at. And we generally don’t tolerate people laughing at us, even though we are really good at mocking others in public. Most of the time what we think is that you are laughing because you found us real humorous. “Thaangue”, we would say.
When would we learn to accommodate others? When would we learn to respect those who are not from our Kottayam and our Kozhikkode?

I realise that than concealing my identity, I should work on my attitude towards those people who are the real owners of this land.

*I think i should add that the above mentioned features just make it a caricature. There are a whole lot of good and lovable Malayalees out here. Hope you have met at least a few.