The other day rummaging through my attic for something, I caught sight of a trunk that aroused my curiosity. For a moment, I held myself back, fearing it might be a Pandora’s box. Yet, undaunted, I went on to open the box to find a book bathed in dust. Dusting off the book, I noticed that it...
This week I made yet another discovery in my attic. An old book of articles written by Tamil writer Thi Ja Ra (Thingalur Jagathratchaka Ranganathan). Most of these articles were published in Hanuman, an important Tamil literary magazine of the 1940s. The book titled Pozhuthupokku (Pastime)...
This time around, from my attic tumbled out an old book which, re-read out of curiosity, took me to the world of political slugfests and rows of decades ago. The 52-page book Naan Kanda Periyar (The Periyar I saw) was published by Tamilagam way back in 1957. My attic (paran) is home to old...
The paran (attic) is home to old bottles, vessels gifted by grandmothers and great-grandmothers to their grand-daughters for their weddings, easy chairs that used to keep the grandfathers, mostly couch potatoes comfortable in the twilight of their life, four-legged chairs bereaved of one-leg, a...
Silver Tongue Srinivasa Sastry is this week’s rediscovery from my attic. Tamil word ‘paran’ is one of several words knocked out of existence in the language. Part of the old-time Tamils’ common lingo, paran meant attic or loft, an indispensable feature of houses built in those days, mostly in...
The Tamil word ‘paran’ is one of several words that have been knocked out of existence in the language. Part of old-timers' lingo, paran meant attic or loft. It was an indispensable feature of houses built in those days, mostly in villages, where all things dispensed with or condemned were...
