South Indian = Madrasi

North Indians have always been poor at differentiating between the people from the four southern states and appreciating the difference between their languages, cultures and ways of life. Any south Indian is referred to as a "Madrasi". With the vast movement of North Indians to cities like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai in recent times, I was expecting that the situation would have changed by now. I was expecting that at least TV channels would be able to make this distinction very well.

A few days back I was watching a discussion on CNN-IBN. English news channels live on hype and they had a mouth-watering topic that day - the controversy related to the Sethusamudram project. One of the participants was a historian from Tamilnadu, I don't remember his name now. The discussion was moving on the lines of "Is Lord Sri Ram only popular in the North India? Is he relevant in the south?". The anchor asked the historian if he could elaborate. The historian said something on the lines of "Ram is not worshipped in Tamilnadu. There are hardly any temples for Ram in Tamilnadu. In fact many believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fate" At this stage, the anchor concluded something like this: "So worshipping Ram is limited to North India. Since South Indians don't worship Ram, we can't say that Ram is an integral part of Hindus in India." These are not the exact words she used, but pretty close.

Now, I really don't know whether Lord Ram is worshipped much in TN. This is a far too controversial topic to write about. What irked me is, how can Tamilnadu represent South India completely? Of course Ram is worshipped in Karnataka. Of course there are temples for Ram in Karnataka and AP. We surely don't believe that worshipping Ram brings ill fortune. Ram may not be as popular a god in South India as he is in the north, but saying nobody worships Ram in the south is too much of stretch. Come on folks, South India is not just TN. While at it, every South Indian is not a Madrasi!