"Tomorrow it will be a new year," my father said.
It has been a few days since he talked about anything other than the damn virus. No, not COVID-19 but the shingles that has made the lower jaw movements a tad painful.
After a couple more minutes of chat, I said, "you talked a lot today compared to two weeks ago."
"Yes, it is slowly getting better. But very slowly," he replied.
And then we talked about the coronavirus too!
He passed the phone to my mother, who also remarked about the new year. "But, it is not like how it used to be celebrated," she added.
It is the Tamil New Year.
We mark time in many ways. Birthdays are our personalized new years. There is the January 1st new year. The Islamic calendar. Rosh Hashanah. The academic new year. We have a gazillion "new years" all in the same year.
But, celebrations are muted in the time of the coronavirus :( Strange and eerie times these are!
Tamil is one of the oldest living languages of the world--if not the oldest--with a vast body of literature. The older I get, the more I appreciate the immense richness in which I grew up, but failed to systematically study. I am all the happier that I came across the fantastic biography of Tamil that David Shulman authored. As he so wonderfully put it, "to know Tamil" can also mean "to be a civilized human being."
This classic from quite a few years ago, with lyrics by the poet Bharatidasan convey a lot about the language. And, of course, set to delightful music by the old masterful team of Viswanathan-Ramamurthy.
But, of course, the old Tamil is even more difficult to understand than Shakespeare's English can be to a teenager of today. We needed experts to interpret that old Tamil to us.
We need experts to guide us out of this global catastrophe. More than ever, we need humanists to interpret the human condition.
As we struggle through, we will continue to mark the passing of time ... by wishing us better times ahead.
Happy new year, dear reader!
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