),
but after a few months out of that hectic environment, I began
to notice that I was forgetting some of the crazy experiences
that had occurred there. ranging
from daily to monthly (though I try to keep
them to a weekly schedule).
The first and oldest of them is the
Old Jakartan Newsletter, which
was started sometime in 1995, in a desperate attempt to keep the
memories of our Jakartan travels. Indonesia was a wild experience
(and I do mean wild ),
but after a few months out of that hectic environment, I began
to notice that I was forgetting some of the crazy experiences
that had occurred there.
The original newsletter evolved as I attempted to keep the old group
appraised of each others' activities, but swiftly bourgeoned into
a bunch of wild (but true, honest!) tales of our time in that country.
Its scope's expanded now to cover just about every country and place
I want to write about (hey, I write it, I get to do darn
near anything I please !
I control the horizontal ... )
The second one is the Vadakke Kurupath family newsletter. A swift explanation of this, for those of you who might have unsuspectingly walked in here without a clue of what's going on.
Kerala, my home state, is matrilineal i.e. the children take the mother's name, which is applied as a prefix to their own. The father's lineage isn't normally mentioned. My formal name, Kerala style, would be Madassheri Balakrishnan, since my mother belongs to the Madassheri family.
However, most of this planet doesn't seem to understand anything other than a patrilineal lineage, alas, as my uncles swiftly found out when they approached the Passport office: the officials couldn't understand how they were related to their fathers when they didn't have anything in common with their father's names (I know, I know ... bureaucratic imbecility ...). But still, in an effort to ease the way, the generation before mine took on both names ... their matrilineal prefix, as well as a patrilineal suffix.
Which converts my name to Madassheri Balakrishnan Menon, since Menon
is my father's surname. Which, of course, is why I'm just known as
Bala Menon Few besides
my family members are capable of remembering (or pronouncing
) that particular
mouthful.
Though I did run into one amusing case to the contrary ...
So strictly speaking, the Vadakke Kurupath family would be the line of
descent of my paternal grandmother (my father's side of the family; he
takes the Vadakke Kurupath name from his mother). However, the
newsletter's just a means of keeping a widely scattered family linked
together, howsoever small a method it might be, so it's been extended
to several non-Vadakke Kurupath members as well. (And yes, we're terribly
scattered across the planet
Heck, I met a distant uncle of mine in Indonesia, and I had never been
aware of his existence before !)
The more, the merrier !
It makes for an interesting life.