Vim & Kerala

Vim & Kerala

Recently, I was having tea with some of my friends. One of them is from Tamilnadu and some are from Calcutta. During the conversation, I realized we Keralites have a long standing relationship with Vim! How I realized it was when I cracked a joke regarding Vim and only my malayalee friend laughed. The others did not get it.

For those of you who have stayed long enough in Kerala or know Kerala well, you would have already got the joke I am referring to. For others, let me explain. The joke goes like this. In Malayalam, it is “Enikku Vim kalakki Kodukkan thonni!”. In a bit of pretentious English, it goes like this “I felt like offering a drink laced with Vim!”. This sentence doesn’t ring a bell in any other part of the country. Only people from Kerala get the context of it.

The context is that if there is a person whom you are not very fond of and you want to exercise that displeasure, one of the ways of conveying the displeasure is by saying the above statement. Here, the intention is not to kill the person but you dislike the person enough to create a large degree of discomfort or an upset stomach J.

We Keralites are very good hosts. But during a visit to kerala and you hear ‘Vim’ in the conversation, just be a bit careful will you? J