Baardaan … Necessary Burden … (Tulu terms)

Among the more evocative Tulu terms that I came across was ‘Baardaan’ … this was again a term that I heard very frequently when I was in Mangalore … the term was used to refer to chaps who were utterly useless, but indispensable for some inexplicable reason … a sort of ‘necessary burden’ …  

I asked my father the actual meaning of this term … he then explained that boats and steamers, ships too, had to have a certain amount of weight to remain afloat in water and not wobble or topple … a sort of optimum weight, which involves some kind of physics related to ‘displacement’ and all that …  remember Archimedes and his eureka moment?  Yeah, exactly, that sort of thing … so, for the steamer or ship to have the optimum weight, it must have enough freight to carry, especially, if it is a cargo ship … sometimes there isn’t enough cargo to carry, but existing cargo must be transported, so, sand bags are dumped into the cargo hold to make up the required weight … these sand bags are only there to make up the required weight, and apart from that they don’t serve any purpose … but they are necessary, otherwise the steamer would wobble and topple … this burden has to be carried … it is a total loss to ferry these bags of sand, but you can’t do without them … so, these sand bags that are used to make up the requisite weight in a ship are called ‘BARDAAN,’ father said …  

As an aside, Bardaan might have some connection with Burden, you see … same consonant sounds … /b/ /d/ /n/ … maybe the word has Arabic or Persian origins … Mangalore has had trade links with Arabia for centuries before the Europeans came and screwed up everything … “White Man’s Burden” and that sort of thing … come to think of it, most of the Englishmen who were part of the Empire were just making up the numbers … ‘White Man’s A Burden’/‘Bardaan’ …

                                     

Whether ‘Bardaan’ is a Tulu word or not, I am not so sure … and I am not sure too if this term is used across languages in Dakshina Kannada, but it is part of Tulu language … and see, so much hidden behind a word … if only we care to look around …

(Those of you readers who are Tulu speakers or are from Dakshina Kannada … please do send me common words/terms of similar resonances to continue the thread … you could also write a whole post, and I would put them as ‘Guest Posts’ … )