Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Pandaaram a.k.a Damn!

Pandaaram (Malayalam) is a genuinely funny curse word. It is supposed to be least inflicting to the listeners, even though it provides an apt venting mechanism for fury, frustration and anger in the form of a word.
Pandaaram in its simplest, or standalone format has the same usage as singular utterances of f* or shit or damn.
When combined with other stupid words , like for example , "Pandaaram adangan!" is like "Damn it!"
Like i said before, since Pandaaram is the stepping stone of cursing, chances are that it would not be very popular among friend circles or higher business circles. Rather, pandaaram is more or less confined to households, relatives, kith and kin. There, Pandaaram is both light, meaning not much harm, as well as saying "I am dead serious about this!".
The usage of a curse word is directly proportional to the tolerance and the "badness" factors of the receptors. For e.g, without umpteen utterances of "F" you probably cannot "curse" with a gangster, a rap singer, or a city teenager. This might not be the case with friends or family. Multi-linguals like you are me are blessed with a plethora of curse words or varying degrees or relief and infliction. For e.g, I have a choice of english, hindi, tamil and malayalam. However certain languages are not really apt for cursing, because the language by itself has a singing effect, is very polished or sounds delicate. Blunt and brute languages (I dare not quote any examples) should be perfect for cursing. Which brings forward the question of if you were to design a language, how would you structure the curse words ? (Enya has already made a new language called Loxian, for her new album Amarantine, Check out the lyrics for 'Less than a Pearl'). She found none of todays languages befitting to write the song

What made me write about Pandaaram is a movie called "The Squid and the Whale". In it, a 10 year old, does all kind of swearing and cursing. Ofcourse it gets a little panicky. He is justified by the emotional distress of his parents separating. The movie is an auto-biography of the director, presented in a very realistic way.

One another Universally important thing, is that 9 out of 10 previous blogs in Cranial Exodus are mine!!! Which makes me ponder, whether my blogger-brothers cant overcome the feeling of "aargh! should i blog this?" , or whether they are plain bored, or more horrifyingly, they have found the real life outside and decided not to waste time blogging!

1 comment:

Zeus said...

For a second I thought it was a blog about our Pandu Ram!

LOL!