MADRASI AND THE NORTHEAST
‘Say Manipur’ was the curt response of the lady who was introduced as the new Accountant of the branch in the bank. The HR person who introduced her stated that she is from North East I think Nagaland or Mizoram and the lady naturally felt offended. This reminded me of my initial days in the bank in the seventies when people called me Madrasi and linked people of Karnataka, Andhra and Kerala as my ‘jathwala’ hardly realizing that not only language and also our food and culture have lot of variation. Admiring on our English they also wondered why we speak in English and not in our own language blissfully ignorant of the four languages in the four southern states. The ignorance went to such...