KATTE - A PROGRESSION OF SORTS (19-July-2020)

A katte in the front porch was the first to take shape before even our home was designed!  Katte is a word in Kannada language.  In its slang avatar, it’s reference is to an elevated platform like a bench from olden days built in front of the houses so that family and friends sat down together to chat; while in a more formal avatar, it refers to a platform or a stage to launch activities, also built as barrier walls to rivers and ponds.  In villages the panchayat - a village council, sat down to discuss politics and triage local disputes towards final settlement with its reference as katte. 

In the 1970s our grandparents lived with us.  My grandfather had fought for our freedom struggle, was in his 80s and sat down with friends at a large katte in the evening hours for extended discussion on all topics under the sun – from the esoteric like Vedanta philosophy to the mundane ones like politics.  Others too had participated actively or indirectly in freedom struggle and discussed matters of prime importance to the nation’s betterment.  Grandmother and her friends sat down to discuss the world of food and the variations in their preparations, likes and dislikes of family members, as well the gossip of neighbors that spruced their life and sprinkled spice into their food preparation.

When we were college-bound young men and later when we made our entry into our first jobs, we friends collected in the evening hours at a designated place ‘katte’ to break the monotony of the day.  Remember it was the late 1980s, days when people deemed a landline phone as a luxury.  Most of us had completed our engineering in local colleges and frequented our katte since it brought together quite an ensemble of personalities with their own idiosyncrasies and whims and fancies.  Friends sat here to write computer codes for their internship sojourns, and others filled application forms for their admission to post-graduate courses.  It was considered sacrosanct for people to initiate their USA application process from this coveted platform ‘katte,’ since the results were close to 100% success rate amongst its members.  Friends flew to the other continent and settled down in USA for greener pastures.  Katte helped all friends to bond and network for increased synergy.

For the same good old katte setup, the new garb in WhatsApp form has brought about a transformation in our abilities to chat through a virtual context.  It is to the world of social media for today’s digital generation what katte was for our past generation.  WhatsApp platform brought us all together to its full strength while some of us were out of sync for a couple of decades.  A tsunami of messages to re-introduce members back into the group to identify the coordinates shaped the conversation during the initial few weeks. 

After we reminisced for a few weeks it was time to go back to the younger days of leg-pull and friendly banter. Many of the group members had undergone metamorphosis in their thought process as well as their expertise areas.  Life had taken us through twists and turns.  The chat from a single topic of interest led to multiple threads where the crisscross of messages transpired into a cacophony of themes, nevertheless kept the team spirit in unison; akin to multiple thread discussions at katte.

Katte.com - in today’s ubiquitous social-media world is our renamed WhatsApp group but all have maintained the same level of energy and spirits.