Malayalees often face the predicament of how to address people in a social circle. Though the changing life styles have brought in a deluge of anglicized terms like ‘uncle’ and ‘aunty’ into the list of terminologies of an average Keralite, it has resulted in more disadvantages than advantages.
Many a time, the blatant overuse of these stereotype words could turn an interesting conversation sour. There are no hard and fast rules on addressing a person aptly in this society. Many malayalees have made their own rules and assumptions to add these suffixes. The common yardstick employed includes calling every married person, ‘uncle’ or ‘aunty’ as the case may be, which might not make sense at all. Someone in their mid thirties who happen to be unmarried, calling a married woman of 20 ‘aunty’ is nothing but a blunder.
Servants and bus conductors use these words 24×7 without sparing a thought towards the context or the milieu. A much more refined approach would be to address a person by his first name rather than the ‘one size fits all’ ‘chettan’( brother) and ‘chechi’ (sister) monologues, which are not just offensive but also could sound crude and out of place to at least some.
For instance, don’t you think addressing a person as Mr. George would sound more refined and suave rather than calling him ‘chettan’? While addressing strangers, general terms like ‘excuse me’ and ‘hello’ would be definitely better than the above mentioned terms that are fast losing their sheen due to overuse.
The baffling part is that while Malayalees go all out in tagging along the Indian way of thinking that “all Indians are brothers and sisters’, this notion is totally missing in most of their deeds. The ever increasing incidents of rape, murder and eve teasing bares this naked truth threadbare. It is high time that the residents of this state take a retrospection of the disparity between their words and deeds and do something to bridge this glaring gap.
Hi Usha,
First of all, let me applaud you for writing such wonderful blogs. I partially grew up in India and latter abroad. With the little knowledge I have, I would like share my views here.
As mentioned by you, the word ‘chettan’, ‘chechi, ‘Uncle’ or ‘Aunty’ is definitely abused in many circumstances. But, the replacement of these words with Mr. X or an ‘Excuse Me’ is almost impossible. A literal translation in spoken Malayalam is almost non existent. How many instances can we or anyone point out where the bus conductor says Kshamikkane… ( Excuse Me or I am Sorry). At the same time, I believe these words show respect, if taken in the right sense.