During the auspicious occasion of Onam, in this episode of Punchline, Mr. Tarun Chauhan, a veteran in the advertising and marketing industry, shares his experiences of his time spent in Kerala.
#Kerala #Onam #KeralaStory #Punchline #Advertising #HWNews #TarunChauhan #TheKeralaStory #OnamFestival #Celebrations #Experience #Marketing #Industry
#Kerala #Onam #KeralaStory #Punchline #Advertising #HWNews #TarunChauhan #TheKeralaStory #OnamFestival #Celebrations #Experience #Marketing #Industry
Category
đź—ž
NewsTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:10 Hello, how are you?
00:16 Happy Onam.
00:18 I'm recording this on a festive day.
00:22 Wishing you all a very happy Onam.
00:25 And may you have a fabulous year ahead,
00:27 for you and your families.
00:29 Since I'm recording this on the day of Onam,
00:33 I thought I will speak about a subject that I experienced recently.
00:40 In fact, yesterday something very interesting happened.
00:43 A friend of mine called me up.
00:45 In fact, I called him up to wish him happy Onam.
00:48 And he said, "Tanu, you know what? Tomorrow between 1 and 2,
00:51 Malayalees are going to celebrate Onam, having lunch together."
00:55 I thought that was so beautiful.
00:57 Onam has no religion.
01:02 Onam is a festival for Malayalees.
01:05 Christians, Muslims, Hindus, all celebrate this festival very, very beautifully.
01:11 And every year, when I speak to my friends during Onam,
01:17 I find it so fascinating how beautifully they celebrate that festival.
01:23 You know, there are stories about Kerala.
01:29 There are stories about Kerala from various people.
01:32 From writers, authors, politicians, filmmakers.
01:36 I have a story of Kerala which I want to talk about.
01:40 And I think it's appropriate that on a day like this, we speak about it.
01:45 You know, for the last two years,
01:48 I've been going through some kind of funny health crisis with my wife.
01:54 It's not life-threatening, but it's been painful.
02:00 So, you know, when you go through any kind of illness,
02:03 every mother and her puppy is a consultant.
02:09 And it tells you what to do.
02:11 And because you are the receiving end, you end up doing pretty much whatever anyone tells you.
02:16 So, someone told us to go to Chennai and meet some doctors there.
02:21 We went and met them there. We went to Delhi.
02:24 We went all over, Hyderabad.
02:27 In the middle of all this, someone came home from Kerala.
02:32 And I won't get into specifics. Someone came home from Kerala
02:36 and said, "The Ayurveda doctors of Kerala are the best."
02:40 So, I said, "Okay. Let's take a chance. We've done all this. Let's do also this."
02:45 So, my wife and me booked our ticket and we went to Kerala.
02:49 And we were supposed to meet some very happening Ayurveda guru in Kerala
02:56 who was supposed to treat my wife.
02:58 So, we've taken all the medical reports and typical bells and whistles.
03:02 We get off at the airport and Joseph, our driver, meets us there.
03:08 And we go to Varakkal.
03:11 We're staying in the Taj Varakkal
03:13 because this guru was somewhere around Varakkal.
03:16 And we reach there.
03:19 We got there. We had lunch.
03:21 And then we called the person who was supposed to take us to the guru.
03:25 And to our bad luck, the guru was ill.
03:30 So, he wasn't meeting people.
03:33 Now, that was disappointing.
03:37 And by the time we got from the airport to the hotel,
03:42 we had already briefed our driver about why we were in Kerala.
03:49 And Joseph got to know that the guruji is not there.
03:53 The Ayurvedic guruji.
03:55 So, anyway, he said, "Now, what's your plan?"
03:57 So, next morning, Joseph took us to the Paramanavam temple
04:00 which I think was an absolutely mind-blowing experience.
04:05 He organized everything. It was fabulous.
04:09 From there, he took us to another temple which is close to Varakkal.
04:15 Now, these are both 800,000-year-old temples.
04:19 Absolutely stunning. Absolutely beautiful.
04:23 Joseph knew the whole story.
04:25 He explained it to us before and after.
04:28 Though we knew a bit about it.
04:30 But he was at it.
04:33 And then he said something very interesting.
04:35 He said, "Sir, leave all this Ayurveda thing.
04:38 Take it to a nice place."
04:40 So, he took us to the Kerala Government Ayurveda Hospital in Varakkal.
04:46 And I think that was a game-changer for my wife.
04:52 And I found it damn fascinating because...
04:55 We just landed up there.
04:56 We landed up there. We had no appointment.
04:58 It is back and beyond.
05:01 It's very difficult to find, locate it.
05:03 But Joseph took the place. He took us there.
05:06 To our good luck, that day, the doctor was there.
05:09 A lady doctor.
05:11 She chose to meet us.
05:15 The beauty of this whole thing was the consultation fee was 10 bucks.
05:21 And I kept trying to convince the lady at the counter that 10 bucks...
05:25 We have stopped printing 10 bucks. We will get one from her.
05:28 Anyway, she refused to take anything else.
05:30 So, I had to go around. I wanted the 10 bucks for her.
05:32 And then we met the doctor.
05:35 And that lasted for two and a half to three hours.
05:40 And I think that was a game-changer for my wife.
05:43 One of the big learnings for me that day was that Ayurveda has no medicines.
05:49 Ayurveda works on diets.
05:51 And that day we learned a lot of many things about Ayurveda.
05:57 She was fantastic. She was stable.
05:59 She knew what she was doing.
06:02 People can go and stay in the hospital. It's all free.
06:06 But you can't stay for more than 10 days.
06:08 There are some terrific rules over there.
06:10 But that experience was absolutely mind-blowing.
06:14 Why am I saying all this?
06:17 The reason I am saying all this is...
06:19 Joseph Christian drove us around, showed the place, took us to temples, took us to an Ayurveda clinic.
06:27 He is in touch with us even today.
06:29 He knew more about Hinduism than I knew or my wife knew.
06:37 Kerala is a very educated state.
06:42 Very high levels of literacy.
06:44 Very high levels of etiquette.
06:46 They have religion which is very, very strong.
06:50 But religion does not come in the way of their social fabric.
06:53 I think like most of us in Hyderabad, we call ourselves Hyderabadis.
06:57 There is a Malayali first and then a Christian, Muslim or a Hindu.
07:01 They are so amazingly networked. It's unbelievable.
07:06 What is even more beautiful, which I discovered and learnt, is their access to their political representatives.
07:13 Everyone knows everyone there.
07:15 Everyone talks to everyone.
07:17 So even if you have a power failure in a house,
07:20 if you have a power failure in your house,
07:22 they end up calling up the MLA and the guy comes to attend it.
07:25 Unlike politicians in the rest of the country, who we have no access to.
07:32 I think one of the huge upside of being an educated society
07:38 is that you are not caught in this whole hierarchy nonsense.
07:42 Everyone is equal. Some are more equal than the rest.
07:46 But Kerala, the amount of sports,
07:51 I mean every village had a cutout of Messi, Ronaldo.
07:54 It looked like a Ronaldo village or a Messi village or an Aymar village.
07:59 Their love for sports, their love for education, their love for good things in life is so fantastic.
08:05 They are just not caught up in all this small nonsensical stuff.
08:08 And it shows.
08:10 You look at your team that qualified for the finals at the World Athletic Federation.
08:17 Two of them are from Kerala.
08:19 Look at the scientists at ISRO. Most of them are Malayali women.
08:22 Because they study, they educate themselves.
08:25 They don't let religion come in the way of their intellectual growth.
08:31 It's a huge learning for each one of us.
08:35 It's a huge learning for the rest of the country.
08:38 You can like them, you can dislike them, but you can't ignore them.
08:42 They are such a fantastic bunch.
08:44 They are together.
08:45 During crisis, they support each other.
08:50 They stand up for each other.
08:52 And driving around the backwaters of Kerala, meeting people, having chai at taporis, sitting at railway junctions.
09:01 You learn so much about that state.
09:03 You learn what a beautiful state it is.
09:05 You learn how respectful they are to each other.
09:08 You learn how respectful they are to outsiders.
09:11 I mean, I can go on talking.
09:14 I can just go on talking.
09:16 They are the second or third richest state in the country.
09:21 Being such a small state. Why?
09:23 Because they work bloody hard.
09:25 Their priorities are very clear.
09:27 You can take anything from a Malayali, but you can't take his job away.
09:31 Because they just give it 300%.
09:34 They are at it 24/7.
09:36 They work hard.
09:38 You go to Delhi.
09:40 Most of Delhi is run by Malayalis.
09:43 Most of bureaucracy in Delhi is run by Malayalis.
09:45 Because they are there.
09:47 They are committed, hardworking.
09:49 I think because they are so educated, they are also less corrupt.
09:52 It's a subjective statement I made.
09:55 But yeah, I'm saying, as the literacy level goes up, your sense of self-pride also goes up.
10:02 Which means you also start being less corrupt.
10:04 Yeah, I just think a lot of us need to learn a lot of things from that little state down south there.
10:13 It's a paradise on earth.
10:18 It's beautiful.
10:20 Cleanliness, quality of food, quality of people.
10:24 I mean I can just go on and on and on.
10:27 We went for three visits to Kerala during that period.
10:30 This was our first visit. We went back twice more.
10:33 And all three occasions we stayed at Varkan.
10:36 I have some really, really good friends in Cochin.
10:39 And they are chilled out.
10:43 They are so secure. They are so comfortable with life.
10:46 The government is stable.
10:49 The people are stable.
10:51 They don't bicker over stupid things.
10:53 Life priorities are clear.
10:56 So I think today being Onam and the festival of people of Kerala,
11:03 I just thought it's only fair that I compliment them for who they are,
11:09 what they have done to this country,
11:11 and how much we've got to learn from them.
11:14 How much all of us across the country need to learn from them.
11:18 Yeah, each state has got its own strengths and weaknesses.
11:21 But Kerala strangely has a very nice package.
11:26 And package from end to end.
11:29 From protection of the girl child, to welfare of the women,
11:33 to education, to job security, cleanliness.
11:38 The waters look so beautiful, clean.
11:40 You go to backwaters, you don't see plastic everywhere.
11:43 You go to any other place, you go to Maharashtra,
11:45 any of the backwaters, all you see is plastic.
11:47 I mean, it's very sad.
11:50 So yeah, good for you guys.
11:53 Good for you Keralites. Good for you Malayalees.
11:56 Good for you little Indians.
11:58 Keep doing well.
12:01 I'm happy that I've got some really good Malayalee friends.
12:04 I learn a lot from them.
12:06 And yeah, I hope today's punchline goes as a tribute to all my Malayalee friends
12:15 and to the state of Kerala.
12:19 Her story, his story, film story, this is my story.
12:25 My story of a state that I really like.
12:28 Enjoy your Onam. Have fun. And keep prospering.
12:33 God bless you all. Thank you very much.
12:35 Happy Onam.
12:37 [MUSIC PLAYING]