mardi 9 août 2016

THE PHILOSOPHER DENTIST OF FORT COCHIN, DID THE NAME VARGHESE COME FROM THE PORTUGUESE NAME VARGAS

THE PHILOSOPHER DENTIST OF FORT COCHIN or did you know that the familiar name VARGHESE in Christian Kerala is derived from the Portuguese VARGAS?
Over the years I had become accustomed to the excellent dental are of a certain Dr.Jagdeesh but my later travels were just to Fort Cochin. In Cochin, you would soon discover that there is an unspoken network, and once you enter it, you are able to obtain excellent services in each and any field of human enterprise. Over the course of years I have made excellent friends in Cochin, and Mr. M suggested that I see Dr. Varghese. A mild mannered man, he waited at his surgery for nearly 45 minutes after he had finished his daily work, as I was delayed getting to his place of work in Ernakulum. Welcoming words on the wall of the surgery included: We treat you as a human and not as a patient, which was later to be proved by his kind manners and explications of my dental health or shall I say ill health? He organized a full mouth x-ray which is like a cat scan of your teeth! Not only that when he learned that I would like to see an ophthalmologist on this very short visit to Fort Cochin, he arranged me to meet Dr. A of Lotus Eye Institute.
The next day we were both invited by our kind mutual friend Mr. M, after my ophthalmic appointment to a delicious lunch at Nawras Restaurant, which has some of the best Kerala food that I had tasted in Cochin.
During the next few hours of conversation, it was evident that he was cut of a different cloth and is much more interested in philosophy and history than materialism and that his years in the UK had prepared for his successful return to the land of his ancestors.
I am glad to have become a friend of Dr. Seby Varghese. Our conversation centered around the history of Fort Cochin (the only piece of this part of the world I know anything about, I came to Fort Cochin from London yesterday and leave for Kuala Lumpur tomorrow) and while we were talking about the Portuguese period, he told me something: that his name Varghese is a corruption of the Portuguese surname VARGAS, a name quite common in South America (I thought of Getulio Vargas, the President of Brasil for a long time in the nineteen thirties and if you write down the sound of Vargas in Portuguese, it would be VARGES..And over the course of time corrupted into the popular VARGHESE in the Kerala Christian Community). Verghese used as a first name, see the spelling, may have its origin in the name George?
Also he introduced me to Mr. G of Burger Street in Fort Cochin of whom I would write later


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