The Thunder Connection

One of the first things I did when I started using the world wide web a couple of decades ago, as was the custom back then, was search for my name. I used my last name for that: Tupan. What I found was initially very surprising, but there was also a sort of logic to it. Diving deeper into it, and thinking about it, it showed me some very interesting lines of connections.

Two brothers and a typhoon

The story, for me, starts centuries earlier. In the realm of origin stories. It's not precisely known when exactly the events took place, but at one point in time, two brothers were on the ocean in their prahu, or pirogue, a small boat consisting of two canoes connected together. It generally is powered by oars and sometimes a small sail. They suddenly found themselves in extreme weather, and a typhoon split their prahu in two, and both brother drifted apart and found themselves stranded on two very different islands. They both took on the same name, with different spelling, a variation on the, probably Chinese, word typhoon. My forefather named himself Tupan. And so, our family tree was planted on Ambon, an island in the Maluku archipelago, that now forms the eastern part of Indonesia.

Back to the mid-1990s, when I ventured out in the ocean of the then relatively new world wide web, which we navigated with the prahu of Mosaic and Netscape. You would have to navigate to a search engine back then. The likes of Altavista or Hotwired I think I used. So, I typed in my last name on one of those. Tupan. Two notable things came in the search results that initially surprised me. Made me laugh, then made me wonder until I found the connections. I still don't know how it's all connected, but the links are too obvious for it not being connected.

A thunderous drum

The first thing I found was an eastern-european drum, that was mainly in use in the Balkan-countries. The name reminiscent of the Turkish word for typhoon: tayfun. At least, I cannot but make that connection. Even the sound of the Tupan, as you can find it online, is very much like thunder and lightning strikes. An extreme weather drum.
But this was not the only think I found. The next one took me to another continent, making this a globe spanning adventure. I found my name back on the other side of the Atlantic, in Brazil and further down into the Amazon. From ceramics factory (yes, toilets) to sports clubs to a journalist: the name seemed very present in the South American country know for samba and indigenous tribes living deep in the rainforest. A group of tribes, often grouped around the tupi-guarani language, have a pantheon that includes a god of thunder and lightning. And yes, you guessed it, the name of this god is Tupan.

Through my name, I am connected to different place that together span the globe. And now that we have arrived in Barzil, here's the interesting thing. I was not able to watch the qualifying session for the Brazilian GP yesterday, because I was on a long drive. Somehow, heavy rain flushed out the session. It was such extreme weather, that the FIA had to decide to postpone qualifying to the next morning. A much more convenient time for me. Maybe that god of thunder and lightning helped his namesake a little.