Starting trouble

Reading postcards sent by relatives that start in the traditional way: writing "Safe" or with the symbol we call "PuLLayaru Chuzhi" (or is it "PiLLayaru Chuzhi" ?) i.e. the Tamil equivalent of something like "Om" or some such substitute that many people use before writing anything - be it letters or exam answer sheets, I realize I haven't done that in a long while. Perhaps the last time I did that was in one of my exams in college which was a little bit of a luck-seeking strategy after I thought some of the previous exams were stinkers of a higher degree - the eagle-eyed supervisor spotted it and didn't understand the squiggle. I told him it was like an Om which he seemed to understand, but still seemed to walk away with a view to keeping one eye on me lest I was trying to pull a fast one on him and mark my paper in some strange way to aid some kind of exam-scam.

The cultural romantic would say this is another hit of the email age, another small piece of tradition being lost - perhaps to placate him, we can have a small set of images to choose the headings from when we send our emails.