Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on February 20, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.
This is another project that I have been trying to do for a very long time. It has been a long time dream to write my blog in Malayalam. I started on this curve by trying to write for the Malayalam Wikipedia. I found here Malayalam that I could not easily understand. This led me to try and read Malayalam newspapers once in a while. Finally, reading this blog post over at Gerrard’s blog, pushed me to write Malayalam online.
I do not much of the concepts that have been talked about on Gerard’s blog. These are things that would be awesome to learn more about. I have put them separately to learn and research about them. Perhaps, it may not be essential to understand all of them before blogging in Malayalam but this is a good starting point.
Being born and brought up in Mumbai, I have been practicing to write in Hindi and English primarily. I do speak in Malayalam daily at home but do not write as often as I could. This has made me feel sorry sometimes and also feel a sense of contribution to the death of a language. It may not be as the same many other Indian languages with nearly 36 million people speaking the language world-wide but it could very easily get there.
One of my efforts on having these thoughts was to try and write Wikipedia articles in the Malayalam Wikipedia. The thing was that I was not really sure about Malayalam spellings. I knew the alphabet set to read Malayalam but not really write it well. Perhaps it is a great way to reconnect with my grandmother as well.
So, I’ve written a blog post today without any help from anyone. I’ve written it using Google Transliteration and have not paid any special attention to the spellings. From tomorrow, for every alternate day, I hope to write something on the blog and begin the curve to improve my Malayalam.
February 21, 2011 is being celebrated as International Mother’s Language Day. I hope you do something to begin speaking, reading or writing in your mother tongue.
Parallel Spirals 