There are a lot of blogs that document the frustrations experienced by disbelieving younger generations of communities that are orthodox and thus, by default amusing. However, Tambrahm Rage, and the spin off it inspired Gultrage, are the ones that represent these communities accurately and humorously at the same time, through the ingenious comic strips that are courtesy of various contributors.
The strips that are slightly reminiscent of the incredibly popular The Oatmeal comics are literally ways for people to laugh at themselves. Being a Tambrahm myself, I find Tambrahmrage to be a uncannily perfect comic strip of moments from my own life. It is a fact that our family trees are a hideous tangled web of everyone being related to everyone in at least 2 different ways each. It is also true that we can never actually find palatable food in the fridge at any point in time.
Quirky, witty, hilarious and slightly spastic these blogs are most shared among the members of the communities themselves. Tambrahm which is a non-euphemism for Tamil Brahmins – a community composed of Iyers and Iyengars. Iyers being the less anal-retentive ones in that they don’t consider Iyengars to form the bottom layer of the Arranged Marriage barrel. The Iyengars , even though they’ll never admit it, happen to be known for their dogmatic devotion to their deity and their naamam (a mark of caste that is drawn onto the foreheads of the male members). Gults, the Telugu equivalents of both (or either).
Each community has a million sub-castes which no one can entirely list and no one would care to elaborate on. What ties them together however is a primeval adherence to traditions and rituals without questioning the necessity or purpose. And in that mix, there’s also the mentality of these communities, be it a rabid fascination with ensuring that their offspring have an education in the IITs or an inherent inability to deal with atheists and the LGBT cause (“its unnatural” “how can a man…be with a man”?). I have on occasion, considered saying “they should just be able to do what they want”, but that’s just abhistu and that sort of talk won’t fly in our household.
I guess what I’m trying to say is these blogs remind me of why I like being a Tambrahm by showing me the things irk me about it. Does that even make sense?
Photo credit: sambarboy.blogspot.com
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Vidhya Abirami Iyer is the lesser known name of VAI (tamil for loudmouth). Born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria and living in Chennai, she believes a movie should be made about her. She loves to write and is more often than not quite confused about everything. Sarcasm and being anticlimactic are her favorite past times. She watches TV shows faithfully because they are her destiny. 
Peta Jinnath Andersen is a freelance and fiction writer. Born in Sydney, Australia, to a Fiji-Indian father and Scottish mother, she’s a bit confused about her background, but loves it all the same. Currently living in the US, she has just had her first child, and is busy studying hard in an effort to learn more about her Indian heritage – including taking Hindi lessons – so she can teach her son about just what it is that makes an NRI special.
on August 23, 2011
at 4:05 pm
Mumbai rage made me laugh a lot…
on August 25, 2011
at 3:26 am
the good thing is that u can laugh about these things now and not get shot for blasphemy