yesteryear musings (9) - lifestyle

Practice of madi has become extinct with nuclear families and pigeon-hole apartments replacing joint families and spacious houses. Those who practiced madi will not tolerate anybody else touching them or even coming near them. The non-madi section of the household was called vizhuppu. The madi people themselves wake up in the morning in vizhuppu state. They attain madi state after a bath and wearing madi clothes untouched by vizhuppu people. Can you spot a logical contradiction there? The person trying to enter madi state is vizhuppu, how can he or she handle madi clothes. This is where Physics and ingenuity come into play. Wood is a non-conductor of vizhuppu. Hence the cloth is picked up from the clothesline using one end of a long wooden stick aptly called madikkuchi. The cloth itself retains madiness because it was left to dry by the madi person the previous day and hoisted up the clothesline using the same wooden stick. The clothesline was reserved exclusively for drying madi clothes. It was installed high on the ceiling so that there was no chance of the clothes brushing any passer-by. Other than wood, exceptions to the madi rule were brand new clothes (kodi thuni), silk and rubber. If I remember right, plastic too was conferred the honor in later times. I am not sure about silver though. The madi state was a prerequisite for offering prayers and for cooking. The madi status of a person will get nullified after the person has had his/her lunch.

The madi culture had its associated life style practices too. One was the food routine. You are expected to have lunch around 10.30 AM, tiffin at 4.00 PM and dinner at 8.00 PM. You are branded as a low-caste person if you prefer breakfast (“tiffin”) at 8.30 AM and lunch at 1.00 PM. Due to exigencies of modern work timings, this has slowly but reluctantly come to be accepted. In those days, the menfolk used to leave for office at 10.45 AM and return home for tiffin at 4.00 PM. Another cultural requirement to retain your high caste status was that the lunch should necessarily conclude with rice and curd / buttermilk. Anyone skipping the moru sadam routine was branded as a low caste person.