Ungal Ellorokkum Pongal Nalvaazhthakkal! Pongaloh Pongal! (Happy Pongal to all of You!)

It's that time of the year when Hindus all over the world celebrate their version of the harvest festival. For Tamils, Pongal (lit: boils over or spillover) is their most important festival and this year more than 60 million of us will be celebrating our version of thanksgiving all over the world. Pongal is a celebration of the prosperity associated with the end of the harvest season and is celebrated for four days from the last day of the Tamil month Maargazhi (Dec/Jan) to the third day of Thai (Jan/Feb). [Tamil Calendar]

Unfortunately, it is more than twenty years since I last had the pleasure of actually being in Tamil Nadu during the festivities, but even while growing up in Oman I would look forward to it for two main reasons: my sister and I would always get a new pair of clothes and my mum would cook us all my favourite Tamil sweets and savouries.

In fact the 'boiling over' that takes place and gives us the name of the festival comes from the sweet boiling rice that is made by mixing it with milk and jaggery in pots topped with brown sugar, cashew nuts and raisins. The contents are then allowed to boil over and as soon as that happens, the tradition is to shout "Ponggalo Pongal" (see Subject above) while blowing a conch. It is considered good luck to watch the pot boiling over and that's how the festival gets its name and fame.

In the absence of my mum and lack of skills in boiling my own sweet rice dish, I will have to stay content with merely heating up a ready-to-eat packet of a different Tamil sweet dish. In years gone by, my mum would send a packet of pongal with me on my way back to university from Oman after the Christmas break and I would open it on Pongal. Oh well, maybe next year! Happy Pongal!


Sugarcane branches are used as decoration for the prayer-offering set up. We grew sugar cane in our house in Oman!


The traditional plates used in southern India are banana leaves upon which you can find the items used for the prayer (coconut shells, bananas and the Pongal dish itself - the yellow blob in the bottom-center of the leaf). The patterns on the ground are called kolam.

Who Do You Think You Are?

Most of the UK's 1911 Census went online yesterday, thanks to a challenge made under the Freedom of Information Act. Because the 1911 Census was not covered by The Census Act 1920, which required the closure of subsequent censuses for 100 years, the Information Commissioner ruled that access to it should be given, (though personally sensitive information, such as "details of infirmity or other health-related information" will not be released until 2012). What it does mean is that of the 36 million people living in the UK nearly 100 years ago, more than 28 million of their records are now publicly available ... but at a price if you want their full details. I was rather disappointed with the Pay As You Go bit but nevertheless, it is a wonderful database of information open to public mining.

So far there hasn't been a repeat of the mass invasion that forced the closure of the 1901 census website barely days after it was released in 2002. The overwhelming demand of 1.2 million requests an hour forced the withdrawal of the website five days after its launch, only to be reopened seven months later. To avoid such trouble, the organisers have prepared 26 servers, five times more than the ones prepared in 2002 to cope with the 300% increase in peak demand traffic expected this time around.

Naturally, the mass media have concentrated their focus on celebrity ancestors, in particular Amy Winehouse (whose paternal ancestors were Russian immigrants settled in Spitalfields in the East End), David Beckham (whose great^4-grandfather, John Beckham, was employed by a London borough council as a 'scavenger' to go through people’s rubbish looking for objects of value. His son was a cart/van driver), Kate Moss, Virginia Woolf (who was still unmarried and known as Adeline Virginia Stephen at the time. She described herself as a journalist) and even secret suffragettes who refused to be counted. The Times reported one suffragette as having written: "If I am intelligent enough to fill in this paper, I am intelligent enough to put a cross on a voting paper."

So you may ask, what relevance does this Census have for me? My family only moved here in 1980 but I've found some uses for it. For example I have confirmed that in 1911, the only person living on my street was someone in number 23. Now remember that guy Jack I made a post about a week ago? Well guess what? His family has lived in number 23 since it was built in 1900, so his claim that he is the street's oldest remaining resident is most certainly true. I also looked up how many people from the Slade family were living in my parish and district at the time and there were nearly fifty of them. (Read earlier post to understand why I've mentioned that family in particular). I've also been trying to trace the roots of some of my friends from the North-East but to no avail so far. How irritating it is you have to pay 3-quid a pop just to see each entry's entire details. I wonder if The National Archives had provided the service themselves, instead of selling a contract to an external organisation, they'd've provided the entire database for free?

In any case I've spent sometime exploring how many people with South Asian surnames were reportedly living in the UK in 1911:

RAMANATHAN - 1  (a 25-year-old living in Prestwich, Lancashire - possibly in a cotton mill?)
Khan       - 86
Singh      - 43 (majority living in London but none in Hounslow or out there in West London)
Wadia      - 14 (with ten of them living in Willesden, North West London)
Das        - 13 (besides two pairs of brothers(?) in Fulham and Hampstead, the rest are dispersed all over the UK)
Shah       - 10 (majority living in London with four (possibly brothers?) 21-to-26 year-olds in Kensington)
Rao        - 9  (mainly based in London with three (possibly brothers?) 19-to-25 year-olds in Paddington)
Mehta      - 9
Patel      - 8  (how things have changed since then!!! there are now reputedly 200,000+ Patels living in the UK)
Pillay/i   - 8
Gupta      - 7
Gandhi     - 6  (a family of four in Stoke-upon-Trent and judging by wife's name Eleanor, she was white)
Rahman     - 6
Kapur      - 5  (two young adults in Cambridge and two young adults in St Pancras, Central London)
Saklatvala - 4  (all four members of Shapurji Saklatvala's family when he was working for British Westinghouse)
Sharma     - 4  (all but one living in London, two of them in Kensington)
Chopra     - 3
Kumar      - 3
Narayan    - 3
Kaur       - 2  (both living in the Isle of Wight, possibly with/related to the four Singhs living there as well)
Bannerjee  - 2  (looks like a very young inter-racial couple living in St Pancras, London)
Chatterjee - 2
Rustomjee  - 2
Cowasjee   - 1
Pandit     - 1
Chadha     - 1  (Tiroji Harayan was 23 and living in Holborn, Central London)
Hodiwalla  - 1
Malhotra   - 1
Naoroji    - 1
Krishna    - 1  (23-year-old Raj was living in Lambeth, South London)
Rajan      - 1  (a 17-year-old Ponnambala Thiaga possibly studying in Cambridge? Name is very Tamil)

"It would be so embarrassing to find out that you're the bastard offspring of sibling incest."

Only yesterday the 1911 Census went online and already people have discovered things they would rather had not. I'm talking incest:

Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said many had hoped to find they were the descendants of a passionate but doomed romance between an East End match girl and the Duke of Clarence. Instead thousands have discovered they are the mutant progeny of an illegal union between a slack-jawed farm labourer and his mentally retarded sister. [READ MORE]

The article claims thousands were affected by this. Thousands. Incest then, teenage pregnancy now. A natural progression I suppose...