The Story Of Sivakami’s Tears

By Mahesan Niranjan -December 22, 2013

Mahesan Niranjan

What a coincidence? On flight BA2042 from Colombo to London two days ago, I found myself sitting next to my drinking partner, the Sri Lankan Tamil fellow Sivapuranam Thevaram. I was returning from a visit to Sri Lanka, giving a talk at a conference 

on ICT for Emerging Regions on the subject of modern biology, and taking part in a PhD interim examination of two students whose research — on developing an automatic translation system between Sinhala and Tamil — I help supervise. Thevaram, when I found him, had already consumed a pint of Lion lager, a gin and tonic, and a small bottle of red wine. This was not a surprise.

What did surprise me was that the man was in tears and was staring at some lines in Tamil he had scribbled in his notebook. There were a few drops rolling down his cheeks which he unsuccessfully tried to hide from me. “What is the matter, Machan (buddy)?” I probed. “Well, it is my mothe…” I did not quite catch the last word, did he say “mother” or was it “motherland”?

“Eh?”

Have you ever wondered why we often relate the concepts of mother and country? Motherland, mawbima,thaayaham, mathru bhoomi, and thaay naadu are phrases in common use. On one rare occasion a father to country relationship was attempted (vaterland), but that did not go particularly well. We might think that this mother-country relationship is simply a convenient linguistic construct, invented once and copied in perpetuum. Largely true, but the observation also explains the audacious claim Thevaram made, in response to my “Eh”:                                                   Read More