cemetery looters

Are we not too shy to express our self either orally or in written and is this not one of the major predicament that defines the sucess of man. Right from our young days as toddlers we start acquiring words  syllabi's etc and admiration runs in for people who have  a good vocabulary,more so if it is in a foreign language.Many a times we fumble with words and go blank  at times just for the simple reason that we are unable to recollect the right word/do not know the usage of words used/and also fear making some mistakes in pronouncing them
I learn noah webster is the first dictionary to come out in 1828 with about 70,000 word and on date it has around 475000 words which is again debatable,but i am really surprised with the introduction of new words in our daily life some pure English,some a mix of Tamil and English,some just substituting the local language its only with this back ground and a recent article in the Newspaper which has made such wanderings.
CEMETERY LOOTERS well on seeing this i was just shocked, .thinking that looters have now shifted their venues to cemetery instead of bungalows/homes/and houses,But thanks to the publishers that this was accompanied with a coloured photograph, where a woman made up as kali was danging glee fully with neem leaves in hand some organ of goat might be liver or lungs clenched in her teeth. well this made me to recollect what cemetery looters meant(i did give a momentary smile to myself for that knowledge enhancement).
WELL this is a ritual(festival)that follows Maha sivarathri and popularly known in Tamil as Mayana kolai,and colloquially termed as masana kolai,thats how we used to call it,well the writer wanted to give an account on this and not knowing how to get it on paper has translated each word mayana-cemetery and kokai-looter. so is that so simple to write. Had we known this life would have been soooo.easy for us not to remember words memorise spellings etc.

Coming back about reminisces of mayana kolai,(masana kolai, in our words) this was a dreadful day which we used to enjoy with,terror,we are scared  of horror movies, but still we would like to undergo that thrill, so was the case here too.

As school students, our school had a very big cementry in its neighbour hood, there would be a huge crowd,relatives of dead souls ,having a grave,would have assembled there, decorated the cemetery, and would have come with a spread of eateries,delicacies what they presume was liked by their  dear ones when they were alive.this crowd used to wait for the arrival of a convoy of  people dressed as deities mostly incarnations of kali with deadly colors and some raw meat clenched in hand or mouth.this scene and crowd was enough reasons for us to assemble their as spectators since the event was always around 4 oclock, the end of our school. how ever there were very scary description that     people dressed as kateri(as being named) would come and attack  people if found with any accessories in black.so we used to remove our black shoes dump it in our bags,cover our head and hair with what ever little cloth we have and prefer to take the gaps behind people so that we can have some glimpses but should never be the front liners of any attack, if at all it happens by the kateri, the long wait would end with people(dressed ones) just visiting the burial ground and occasionally they used to lift some eateries from the spread and eat, and people who ever have displayed it get a consoling factor that their dead ones have consumed the same.well this article was not about mayana kollai, but just in appreciation of the editor, who did not shy away from writing about this,many people would have had an iota of doubt how to give a caption and here we had one with out any inhibition wrote CEMETERY LOOTERS, YET ANOTHER ADDITION IN THE LIST OF VOCABULARY ON WEBSTER,well at this instant i am also reminded about a person
who walked up to the board and wrote VENGAYAM well this is response as a students to the challenge posted to a class who can spell (vengayam) in english correctly the expected reply being ONION ,well if we have confidence looks speaking and writing english  is a coool job