Gerald D'Cunha

"Fear is the lengthened shadow of ignorance.” — Arnold Glasow S ome forty years ago, when I came to this one-of-a-kind city, Bombay – now Mumbai - my uncle and aunt (dad’s younger brother and his wife) were kind enough to accommodate me in their small house for seven long years. I lived with them as their own son. I learnt to be more responsible, disciplined, and, above all, more adjustable while I lived with them. I loved my aunt’s funny one-liners. One of them was my favorite: ‘ Su endare sukrunde’ … Translated from Kannada, it meant: Su means Sukurunde! Well, ‘sukrunde’ is the name of a local (Mangalorean) sweet-laddo. So, just a ‘su’ is enough for a gossip-monger or a rumour-monger to make a nice ‘sukrunde’… It was her pet one-liner, which she used every time she would hear someone around her spinning baseless stories – gossip and rumour (Today’s ‘fake news’, which, in our local Tulu, we called ‘ Ge Suddhi’ ) - my aunt had her one...