You see a person in a train, whom you can't place. You doubt whether he is a Malayalee because he does not have the usual walrus moustache, the oily hair or the malayalee accent.
Well when you notice that he has got into the train at 3 am in the night and has set his mobile alarm for 6 am in the morning, and having slept for just 3 hours still goes to the basin to wash his teeth for an infinite period of time, a homespun towel draped across his shoulders, you can be sure then that he belongs to the malayalee tribe. As Douglas Adam quotes in the HitchHiker's guide to the galaxy
<quote>
A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value - you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-to- hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you - daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
</quote>
It may not be for these reasons that the malayalee carries his threadbare towel (homespun, because it is easy to clean it by just wringing it), but all the same it is a malayalee trademark - a symbol of hygiene.
In fact most labourers in Kerala can be found with a red towel wrapped across their head as they go about their menial tasks and when he comes home the first thing he will do is wring the sweat and water out of the "toowal" and have a long renovating bath with the costliest herbal soap available in the market.
Mark these actions. You can bet he was brought up in the best of malayalee tradition.
To a malayalee sleep is sacrosant. He will never disturb his body clock, come what may, I think even if there were to be a mild earthquake.
Another malayalee trait is the habit of constantly worrying. If he reaches a bus stop and has just missed a bus by five minutes, he will spent ages fretting about it. And he can be even verbal about it. "If I was just five minutes early..." to all who care to listen!
This is in sharp contrast to the laid back attitude of rural north india. Time does not flow, it stops. If a bus is missed, of course there will be another bus coming, even though it might be after a good six hours!
I am posting a flowchart that shows what we must worry about, and when nothing can be gained by crying over split milk. But that goes against the malayalee mindset!
