Linguistic Conundrums
How successful he would have been with his romantic enterprise, given the fact that she is eight and a half months pregnant and focussing only on being able to see her feet, is anybody’s guess. Here’s wishing him all the very best for life with his own kid.
Now the letter had to have each line put out three times – one with all the relevant lines in Hindi script, the second line with the phonetic Hindi pronunciation and the third with the actual translation of content into English.
Now, after writing stuff in April 1998 for my Hindi board exam, I have not written anything in Hindi, and having to write put me in a precarious predicament for a very short while.
After mulling over the whole thing for about 45 seconds, I found out, as usual, that it was somebody else’s fault and not my own. Turns out that my particular situation and that of possibly thousands of other donkeys who actually studied Hindi for 10 years in school was so bad because of the popular tendancy that people have of typing out even Hindi words in English. Nowadays, spoken Hindi is good enough so long as one is proficient in reading and writing English.
With the plethora of ‘Hinglish’ words and with the dilution of the language to an extent as is visible, it is no wonder that things are as bad as they are. Karan Johar and his new age metrosexual hippy movies are also equally responsible for having started the trend of anglicization of movie names and abbreviating them in a pseudo fashion.
Now people chat on yahoo messenger in Hindi using English. I was subjected to do it myself as a camaraderie bui ding exercise with my teammate who was comfortable in anything but, and I felt lousy, but had to comply.
We have the Devnagri script for most of the languages with Aryan origins and scripts for all our local languages as well. Spoken proficiency is not sufficient if one intends to use it for other means of communication.
Hope we all can rise above this collective pathetic state of sadness to understand how dumb we actually are by doing whatever we’re doing.
Fights Galore!
A news story last evening that I saw showed the conflict between Maharashtra and Karnataka over Belgaum.
Kasargod district, sandwiched between Kerala and Karnataka also has been part of a border dispute.
What difference does it make which state these districts belong to? People can still move about freely since both are soverign parts of our country. There may be other smaller issues regarding the fact certain taxes collected will go to the coffers of a different state, or that people will have a different address to write to, in the last line for PIN Code and state whenever letters are being addressed to them.
Of course, its not as simple as I make it sound, there are a lot of issues with regard to a dispute between states, but it does not make too much sense to fight over it.
It would probably be a different mat er altogether to fight about disputed territory between nations, though if one looks at the bigger picture, it becomes trivial once again.
Each living being in existance is involved in some sort of fight or the other. It is either a fight for survival, fight for food, for resources, for territory, for pride, for a living sometimes. When there are enough internal and inadvertent external battles that all of us have to endure each day, does it make sense for us to compound our miseries by having more such issues thrust upon us??
Just the other day there was this news article related to Iraqi militants having captured 10 Shia Muslims from India and Pakistan and threatening to kill them. Shias and Sunnis can’t get along.
Ireland has effectively demonstrated that Catholics and Protestants can’t get along either.
Yithzak Rabin’s assassination in 1993 showed that Jews have internal strifes.
Casteism has divided Hindus and engages them in arguments and fights forever. Take Phoolan Devi’s example, for showing you the tip of the fight-berg.
Office colleagues, spouses, siblings, random strangers…everyone just needs an excuse to swing fists or verbal non-complimentary platitudes at each other.
Nobody had warned us that the circle of life wasn’t smooth after all. Guess one has to experience it for oneself.
Airavat vs Rajhamsa
Airavat – originally the name of Indra’s white elephant, that he had stolen from Thailand.
Now, Airavat – name of restaurant on Mysore road just beyond RV college that us cheap ones used to frequent until they hiked up prices by 40%. Now they’re on the verge of bankruptcy due to the absence of our patronage.
Also, Airavat – Mysore to Bangalore and back Volvo bus services. These volvo buses are imported and air conditioned, high end luxury means of travel between the two cities, equipped with a TV on which movies are screened as well.
These Volvo buses are really popular, and one can have a comfortable journey for about Rs.150. I haven’t travelled too much on them, since I prefer the cheaper trains, because I love the discomfort of standing around in a crowded compartment, munching on dirty ‘Maddur vadas’.
These buses are generally nice, but after a thorough cost-benefit analysis, I have decided that a Rajhamsa bus, which is the next level on which a ticket is priced at a reasonably lesser sum of Rs.109 is much more worthwhile.
For someone who is not too hard-pressed for time, and has an office located on the outskirts of Bangalore on the right side, a Rajhamsa bus has a lot more advantages. There is an absence of air-conditioning that I like a lot better, also because there are curtains that one can pull across to hide the sunlight if it ever reaches oppressive levels.
The Rajhamsa bus stops for 20 minutes at some hotel on the way for one to take a loo-break and have something to eat. The Volvo bus, on the other hand, does not stop at all. In addition, this is among those fleet of Volvo buses that does not have a toilet on board, as a result of which its not really a comfortable thing to drink a whole lot before you get on the bus.
The movie screened on the Volvo is usually some lousy movie, and the fact that the movie plays loudly without headphones is a downright pain in the ass, if you want to crash or read a book or listen to your own stuff. This is again an area where a Rajhamsa scores over the Airavat buses.
All in all, I guess it makes me wonder why I personally have chosen to travel on a Volvo when a super deluxe non-AC bus is much more convenient for me to travel on.
(This analysis that I had sort of reminded me of the dialogue that Topol used to have with himself in the ‘Fiddler on the Roof’, though my issues and points have been relatively trivial.)
A walk up the hill
For the past two months, I have made up my mind about sticking to this routine of walking up Chamundi hills along the steps and then coming back down the same way, once a week, each saturday that I can be at home in Mysore.
There is no better kick for an unwilling-out-of-place techie, than to actually be as far away from anything related to work as is possible, and a brisk walk/jog up the steps provides me with just that.
Not having climbed up the hill for the past five saturdays, and not having kept my lungs in the prime shape that one would have so desired, due to voluntary inhalation of unfavourable substances and an abject lack of physical exercises, the task of going up the hill on 23rd sept seemed as daunting as ever.
Fortunately, I had good company with me in the form of a friend, who hadn’t climed up the hill for even longer. As a result, I was able to go up slowly at the pretext of moving up at her pace so as to not to leave her behind.
For the very first time in many that I have walked up the steps, I noticed something that I will never be able to get out of my head. I am shit scared of spiders, and the huge number of spiders that my friend spotted on the way that I have conveniently been oblivious to till date had temporarily shaken my resolve to go up again.
My friend also does not take too kindly to spiders, and shreiked at a resonably loud volume each time she spotted one. She must have screamed atleast 500 times. There were unconfirmed reports of possible hyenas on Chamundi hills
Those fucking spiders are huge and scary. I would rather get beaten up in a WWE ring by whatshisname desi wrestler in the crotch with him wearing steel-toe boots, rather than have one of them crawl on me.
In any case, there are advantages to every bad situation as well, and the presence of these numerous spiders will only enable me to go up the steps really fast now.
You hate some parts of nature (the spiders specifically), but can’t liking the entire package by itself.
Leave the dead alone
Another tearful reunion with the television after a long time.
This time it was not because of the absence of a television at the hotel that I stayed in, it was more of a content based longing. When everything is either in French or Norwegian or Swedish, and there is no nude womans on TV, its really not worth watching.
Hence when I got back to bachelor pad (home will forever be in Mysore, bachelor pad is my apartment), I skimmed through the television channels to see that everything was intact and was glad to notice that the content did not leave a lot to be desired for.
The first ever news segment that I saw after getting back pissed me off no end. It was related to some arbit general comment made by the higher education minister of Karnataka who came up with a comment saying that Tipu Sultan’s name should be scrapped off the NCERT history books because he is ‘anti-Kannadiga’.
He apparently wanted the official language of the then Mysore-state court to be Persian as opposed to Kannada. He also had coins minted only in the Persian language.
Now, our higher education minister needs some education. So what if Tipu Sultan was what he was?
We spend too much time looking back over our shoulders, thinking of all the byegones and has-beens, instead of looking at history from an unbiased perspective and reporting it to the kids who are (under normal circumstances) usually reluctant to know lots and generally mug it up and spew it on their answer papers.
That is one of the many problems facing our country. Too much footage for too many irrelevant people who want their 15 minutes.
Why can’t we all just learn pertinent things from the past and look ahead instead?
Lost and Found
This is probably a corny post for someone who is not in my shoes.
Like I care.
I visited Norway for the second time in two months, courtesy of a company sponsored visit.
I was able to get the same room that I had stayed in previously at my hotel, and was thankful for that, because there was a certain comfort attached to the room that I can’t really describe in words.
In any case, being the part-time cleanliness freak that I am, I was just moving the cushions on the comfy huge chair that was in the room, and much to my surprise, I discovered a Hutch SIM card there.
Turns out that it was my long-discarded pre-paid SIM card which I had lost, though I did not know till that moment that it was missing, probably because I hadn’t felt the need to use it.
I took the now-precious SIM card and kept it safely.
How often is it that you lose something in a foreign country and manage to recover it when you go there again after some time?
Butterfly Effect
Sure, you must’ve heard of it as part of chaos theory or seen the movie starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart.
For those uninitiated, its a theory that tries to come to the conculsion that a small ripple in the past will create tidal waves in the future.
Hitler was supposed to have been aborted, and had that happened, the world would have been an entirely different place.
Hence, the Butterfly effect is something that needs to be given substantial prominence to, given the fact that our own personal lives can have such effects and long-term repercussions based solely on small, supposedly inconsequential incidents.
One of them was a bet that I won a long time ago, thanks to an arrogant chap who wanted his favourite band to be mentioned on stage to gain additional footage.
There are a lot more of them, though the most recent one that comes to mind is that of the Norwegian government’s liquor policy, which is pretty strange for someone from abroad and someone uninitiated.
One can buy beer from supermarkets only till 8 on weekdays, and till 6 on saturdays and not at all on sundays.
Stronger alcohol is available only in special government setup shops, and the sale of liquor is strictly regulated because of this. Weekdays 6 PM and Saturdays, 3 PM.
Now the urge to drink is usually a nocturnal one, an urge that comes over people only after they have completed the daily ritual of work and are relaxing in the evening. The shops, coincidentally stop the sale just around this very time.
Funny, because expensive watering holes selling beer at thrice the price are open till three in the wee hours of the morning on all days.
Anyway, my miniature butterfly effect ripple caused due to the Norwegian government’s strange policies was a very funny adventure.
A 10km cycle ride to buy bootlegged Polish beer, followed by a disappointing relization that they had run out of beer. This low was remedied by someone offering to drive us at a price to another one of these bootleg centers. Well stacked up with beer, my Polish friend and I had another fun ride back home, comprising of a near fall of a mountain bike and some other funny shouting incidents where we scared pedestrians by making funny noises.
This melee was then followed by a visit to a nearby pub, which then resulted in me almost missing my trip to the Fjords because I got too drunk.
Ripples galore!
haircut on a tuesday
Back home in India, it is pretty much impossible to get a haircut on a tuesday, if you are the run-on-the-mill, average kinda guy who has been visiting the same saloon or barbershop ever since you were a kid.
In those swanky places such as VLCC or some other stylist saloons that have mushroomed concurrently in correspondance with the growth of the Indian middle class’ affluence, it is definitely possible to get one on a tuesday, but you should be willing to cough up big.
Cheap guy that I am, I’ve never managed to have a haircut on a tuesday.
The reason for barbershops being closed on a tuesday (and this is pure scientific guesswork) is probably because it is the day of the week that corresponds to the day of the patron diety of the barbers. I am pretty sure this bit of reasoning is spot on.
All that changed in Oslo, on 12th September 2006, when I did have one and that too for free, my first full machine haircut minus scissors, courtesy of a friend of mine named Levo from Estonia, who made me write love letters to his wife in Hindi, (so she’d find it more exotic), accompanied by the corresponding English translation and the phonetic pronunciation for both of them to understand that I was not writing random rubbish.
With my first international haircut, not something most desis can boast of even if they’ve put tent on foreign shores for ages, I now think I must have had the good fortune of getting my hair cut on each day of the week.
Woo hoo!
