Because life comes in a full circle. Like Medu Vada.
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If you have chronicles in your life that are funnier and worth sharing, please share the write up at indiawritestogether@gmail.com under 1000 words. I will post it in this blog. So, this is like the Sit-down comedy (and I just make that word from Standup comedy) of the blog!
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Experiences of Mukundhan Muralidharan
Please read his blog here
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Please read the Tamil to English to Hindi dictionary carefully before communicating!
Dude ————————–दूध————————–தூது
(Referring to a man) (referring to the drink) (Referring to the envoy)
Usage: Eg. The dude was gulping down his दूध when the தூது brought him his important news.
As a parent, there are multiple decisions you tend to take for your kid. The name, cloth or nappies, whether to pass on the family tradition of woodwards gripe water or to believe frightening WhatsApp based scientific papers of the product, schools with the brand or school with a playground and so on. But none is tougher than the greatest choice of them all – selecting your kid’s second language!!!
My parents made that decision for me. The logic in their head was simple. Tamil can be taught at home. Hindi, however, requires specific external treatment. Now see, this is the problem of coming from a family of teachers – your special classes are scheduled much early. Am sure, if the Wachowskis were prominent in those days, they would have quoted this to me:
“You’ve already made the choice, now you have to understand it.” – Oracle, The Matrix Reloaded
The choice was in no way simple or logical. It so turned out that my primary school Hindi teacher too had similar choices enforced on her as a kid. With no Major Sundarrajan type translations (Yeh Teek Nahi hai. My walking stick is not made of teak”), the transition from Thamizh Thaatha to Rahu Thaatha was a painful process. As though adding new vocabulary to the repertoire wasn’t enough, came the thunderbolt. “In hindi, objects had genders”. I lost it when I realised “Pen was masculine”. Tamil Nadu’s elaborate anti-hindi movement now made complete sense.
However, thanks to not having questions like, “If Aanjum Chopra played the on-drive, would it be called the pen drive? Or should she have been called Penjum Chopra in the first place”, I scraped through my exams in school!
Reprieve, finally….
Or so I thought. The first assignment I was posted to at work was at Nagpur. Excited, I had made elaborate preparations in the build up to the trip – questionnaires were prepared, multiple relevant reports were studied, guesthouse for stay booked and the American tourister that had remained my faithful travel companion for over a decade now purchased. One (not so minor) minor detail was however missed.
The guesthouse caretaker, the client counterparts that I met and even the car driver who took us around spoke and understood only Hindi. And my spoken hindi was, at its best, “thoda thoda aatha hai” range. I think the first conversation, with the driver who asked me if he should bring the van or the car to the airport, had me referring to the festival of lights that follows Diwali (Car-teek-hai). The travails did not stop there. As a typical tambrahm, “curd/ more” was a critical part of any diet. When a polite enquiry for more was made to my guesthouse caretaker, it resulted in him dumping a little more poha into my plate. I knew he was symbolically telling me that I was full of hot air (Pohai).
Handling the client therefore called for a back-up – a colleague whose mother tongue was Hindi. The first few meetings went well. Me asking the client the questions (in English), the client answering in Hindi and my colleague making notes. Divide and conquer. But then, there was one meeting where my colleague kept constantly nudging me from behind as I went on for over an hour putting questions to this gentleman. Not to be distracted from a meeting that according to me was going very well, I ignored those nudges until the end of the discussion. The proud me was confronted outside the door by the colleague and the nudge this time was almost a punch. “Dude. The guy was speaking in Marathi and I have zero notes from the meeting!!!”. Damn it. Just when I thought I had figured a workaround!!!
From then to now, I have come a long way. So much so that in Chennai, a place usually known for people’s reluctance to respond in Hindi, for some reason, mistake me for a North Indian speak to me in Hindi. “Anna. Indha road ku epdi poganum” is usually responded to with “Dho kilometre seedha chaliye. Uske baadh left maaro”. Maybe my tamil, they figure, is worse than my Hindi!!
The mis-adventures with languages have not been without its advantages. I am now a multi-linguistic punster (wherein pun is interpreted in its tamil form by those subjected to my literature). Which is why, when my son showed his punster glimpses by pointing at a bird pictured from one side and asked “why is it called a toucan when it has only one kann”, I knew I had to put him through the same drill that I went through!!
I will teach him one day to repeat the following dialogue meticulously, so that people understand the limitations of Tamilians learning hindi:
Naaku Hindi Aatha Nahi (meaning) Hindi is not my mother tongue.
(Tongue) (the language) (Mother) (No).
There are multiple debates around languages and their enforcement floating around. I have realised, language is not important, but communication is.