My dear friend T asked me to create a blog for his birthday. I balked and instead gave him the vcd of chinthavishtayaya Shyamala (=thoughtful Shyamala), a Malayalam movie with a feminist undercurrent. So, T and his wife, my sweet friend M are holidaying in India now and when they get back to Switzerland this will be a surprise.

I live away from India and to make up for the lack of a community of like-minded people, I turned to the internet with a vengeance. I have so many online communities - my secular Indian/South Asian community, my Muslim community, my(tiny)Malayalee community, and I recently found that

even my high school has a mailing list (most of the folks are - you guessed right- software engineers, with some doctors, MBAs and lawyers thrown in for some masala). But none of them can represent me completely, only I can. Hence this blog.

So whats up with this strange (to non-Malayalam speakers anyway) name? Well, Sivarama Menon Road is the name of the street in Ernakulam, Kerala where my parents first moved to in the early '70s. We moved houses three times, all on the same street and Sivarama Menon Road, Lissie Junction, Ernakulam north railway station have a lot of associations for me. When I was in class 6, my classmate K told me that the said Sivarama Menon was his grandad and that Menon was a councillor in the Ernakulam municipal corporation (local government for non-Indians).