Varatte?

Varatte?

Of the many quirks of mallus, one is the way we bid good byes. There are various ways of bidding adieu. One such is by saying ‘varatte’. This word actually means ‘Shall I come?’. Imagine a person sitting in your home for about an hour and just about when he/she decides to leave and you show them to the door. Then this person says ‘Shall I come’? What can be more odd than that? But such are we malayalees J.

There are other ways also of saying good bye. One is to say ‘appo shari’. This would roughly translate to ‘okey then’. About the various usages of that, we will see in another blog J. Another way is to say ‘Kaanam’ . This means ‘We will see’ literally and which actually means ‘We will meet again’.

There are also a group of mallus who say it in English. But they say "Good bye" in a way which is made popular by the man in the picture. He is Mr.Sreekantan Nair, an extremely talented and popular talk show host who has his unique way of saying "Good Baaayyyy!!" :).

The best one which I have come across is when one says “Poyittu varam” which means I will come back again.

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