kerala conundra

...

Kerala

...
Has mainly been communist since the fifties
The rickshaws drivers are scrupulously honest and don’t take tips
The bus drivers are the wildest drivers of them all
There is very close to 100% literacy
Beer is hard to find
Christmas bingo reverberates around the streets conflicting with the Boney M Xmas album
There’s beetroot in the masala of my dhosas
Newspapers have little on "Brokenhagen", and little could be learnt from them
Strikes have been known to happen on the day a new business opens
Christmas tat sellers have uncommon similarities to cockney wideboy touts
Chinese fishing nets keep coming up empty
Jews were here since the time of Solomon… arrived in waves after Masada… were smashed by ‘Moors’, bloodthirstily pogrommed by Portuguese and, with Israel’s rise, are now almost gone
Boy from teak museum village has pudding bowl haircut
The big fishing boats are pretty much the same design as the Argos of the Greeks
Its one of the wealthiest Indian states
...
How many of these things are connected?

...
Nestorian Church in Thrissur, no pictorial representations of people… very like the 500 year old synagogue in Jew Town, Kochi… not sure its actually Nestorian… I didn’t know there were any Nestorians left
Lots of hanging glass… which design might have looked stunning five hundred years ago but now looks antiquated… surpassed by technologies
There are also the Nasrani here… who might be the Malabar Jews converted to Christianity by St Thomas… who supposedly came here on his long mission of evangelism… [Christian originally meant converted gentile … Nasrani, Nazarene, meant converted Jew]… but how they differ from the Syrian church and the Nestorians I do not know