Church battles- Bava and Methran

The wikimapia.org site is real cool one. I located my home in Allapra on the satellite image. It really felt good. The image from above gives us a very different view. The roads are more curved than I thought and the area is so much greener. Most of the houses including my own are not visible due to the trees. When we came to Allapra, the St. Jacob’s church there was very small and cozy. Last year it was renovated actually another church was built in its place. It is so huge and so beautiful almost majestic. The coziness is gone, but it is still beautiful. The church being close to the main road is more accessible to people but somehow it has not been able to match the popularity of the St. Mary’s church in Thurithiply. At Thurithiply during the Ettu Nombu the place is filled with pilgrims who come to the church from far off places to see the relic of Virgin Mary called the Sunoro. Both the churches belong to the Jacobite patriarch section (Patrichis Kakshi). Thankfully St. Mary’s remained outside the fight between the two divisions, though St. Jacob’s has not been so fortunate. The Thurithy family has orthodox sympathies, and they tried to start a fight for the church. This ended in the death of a young boy of the Patrichis Kakshi, which resulted in the revenge killing of a man from Methran Kakshi. The second happened to be our cousin (Thombra). Church wars can be unbelievably vicious. One would think that the elders in the church would try to calm the others down instead often it is they would fan the flames the furthest.

Random Thoughts

Random search through blogs yielded many surprises. I found blogs of old school mates, writing about dreaded teachers who loved caning us for forgetting math definitions, not paying attention in class. One of the blogs mentioned Kurian sir the most dreaded cane yielder of them all. He caned us regularly but on days he wore the dreaded blue shirt, the school vibrated with, “Kurian sir is wearing the blue shirt.” News spread so fast about the shirt that by the time he came to teach the class, most of us would have forgotten all the definitions or lessons we were supposed to have mucked up the previous day. Then would start the merciless caning. It used to be terrifying but now looking back I feel no hate just amusement at that system of teaching, where caning was the norm. Parents had no problem with the caning as long as their wards got good/excellent grades. The caning, though cruel when you think of it now, actually ensured none of us had any other thought than of studies. Infatuations and day dreams were kept safely hidden away, they were too distracting. We studied and studied and studied and most of us turned out well. There are no failures among us.

Then there were blogs about Perumbavoor my hometown or my mother’s hometown. We are originally from Thrissur. But inevitably vacations were all spent at Perumbavoor and those are still the best times of my life. Amma’s home is in Thurithiply and it is my favorite place on earth. I loved waking to the church from Allapra and standing at Kozhipadom and feeling the wind on my face. Kozhipadom is a beautiful expanse of paddy fields with the road running through the center. Each season it looked different. An impossible green when the seed has just started sprouting, then another shade of green as is fully-grown but has not yet flowered. The long grass swaying in the wind and then as it flowers and rice is formed it turns a golden yellow with a rustling music of its own.