> This was because of the monetary denomination of the Indian rupee at the time, where 16 Annas made a Rupee, 12 Kanis made an Anna and 4 Dammidies made a Kani.<p>I had a vague idea about Annas and never knew about the other two, but I realize have encountered shadows of all of these growing up.<p>My vague understanding of annas came from 25 paisa and 50 paisa coins being a thing, and being called நாலணா (4 annas) and எட்டணா (8 annas).<p>Kani I assume is காணி, and finally I understand what Bharathiyar was asking for when he asked "காணி நிலம் வேண்டும்" ("my wish is for meagre land worth a mere Kani").<p>Dammidi must be தம்படி, and survives mostly as an insult: "தம்படி பெறாது" = "this thing is not even worth a Dammidi".
Extremely humble in this statement. He was hugely influential in statistics (Cramer-Rao lower bound, etc) and somewhat recently his work was also quite relevant to RL, eg with Rao-Blackwellization of gradient estimators.