Soma Purana

When I was in middle school (7th grade) and high school (9th and 10th grades), I used to travel to another village 3-4 miles away to attend school. Several of us from my village Munganahalli including my older brother Radhakrishna walk together to the school in Batlahalli. My father would give us small change for buying lunch on some days; other days, we would carry lunch in a box. The money that our father gave us was not sufficient to buy enough food in a local restaurant to fill our stomach. We used to buy idli or dosa. Radhakrishna now recalls (I don't remember) that I used to tell him before going to the restaurant, to ask for chutney as many times as the server would allow us to have without getting upset. Chutney was the side supplement with idli/dosa and there was no charge for it. But, the server would get upset if we played this trick too many times. This is nothing extraordinary but shows how kids devise ways of surviving.

When I was a small kid, other kids, particulalrly, from lowest class used to call me "Doni kodapoda, doppi chowloda" in Telugu. They would call me this way and run away. In English, it means, "the guy with big belly, elephant ears." This would upset me; that is why they were calling me this way - it was fun for them. I remember, I did have a big belly; I was small and thin, but my belly was big. My left ear is strange, it looks big, because it has no flaps like that of an elephant. I inherit this feature from my mother. None of my siblings have this feature. Thinking of this, it just amuses me now. I was not pure either; I would participate in name calling others too. I remember calling my younger brother Gopala "moogu nisuu, mooru gulle." My other brothers and my sister Lalitha would constantly call him so to taunt him. The phrase means, "smooth nose, and three bubbles on the nose." I remember, for a long time, Gopala had three tiny bubbles on t