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Spam 'Professional Mourners' By Alagu Subramaniam

1461 Words6 Pages
Alagu Subramaniam belongs to the Tamil community of Sri Lanka. He was born in 1915 and he died in 1971. He was an author and a novelist. His short story ‘Professional Mourners’ reflects on obsolete customs and practices. INTRODUCTION Professional mourning is also called paid mourning. The people who do this are called moirologists. These mourners are usually from the lower castes, and the upper castes higher them when a member of their family dies.Their job basically is to publicly express grief of the family members who are not permitted to display emotion due to “social status.” Alagu subramanium’s professional mourners attempts to convey a survey about a meaningless tradition linked to funeral rites that was and is present among the various communities all over the world. When a member of a family dies the other members normally mourn over his/her death but in some instances the members might be busy organizing various parts of the funeral and may not get time to actually mourn for the death of their loved ones as a result these people hire mourners to mourn for the deceased in place of them during the funeral ceremony. These mourners are mostly women and are called professional because of their skill to blend it with the atmosphere and also in the same time pretending to be part of the family. Surprisingly in todays world professional mourning has become a well known occupation all around the world and comes with different funeral packages and some include a full
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