Friday, April 22, 2005

Whats in a name!!!

hindi_alphabets

Every once in a while, I go on this 'death-wish' trip to Detriot, to visit J~. So there I was, a couple of weeks back!!.7.00 AM in the Morning, and I'd been in downtown detroit for 20 Mins!!! And the news played the now so familiar

"Good Morning ye all, the latest from downtown Detroit, in a shoot-out lastnight, two policemen were killed......."


(And as you can see, I've survived so far). J~ derives a lot of pleasure in making me relish every moment of being alive, by always coming late to pick me up. After 60 Minutes, I'd almost given up hope of making it out alive, when J~ finally turned up. I let out a sigh of relief and got in the car, and after the 'not bad!!you're still alive' dialogues.....J~ dropped a bombshell...

J~ : So, How would you like to put your Hindi skills to good use....
Moi : eh? Hindi?. Were you drinking last night?..
J~ : Er..No...Actually, we're heading to a 'Children's educational fair' now, as part of the Indian Student association. We're organizing a 'Write your name in Hindi' event.
Moi : Damn neat, so whats for breakfast.
J~: Candy!!! You and I are running the first shift...I'm in charge of setting things up.
Moi : WHHHHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAATTTTTTTTTTTTTT?? Write in hindi?? you and I??..we cant even write our names in Hindi...and our best hindi was left way behind in the Pilani mess..

But J~ was adamant and insisted that we were being way to modest about our now perfected hindi. So there I was sitting in this table waiting for the next bunch of grad students to save us, before we began embarassing ourselves. J~ in the meanwhile came up with this brilliant idea of preparing a chart featuring 'Hindi Alphabets from Mars'. We tried finding the hindi equivalent for every english alphabet, and in this process we 'discovered' that we could represent all the english alphabets with less than a dozen hindi alphabets. An acheivement we're still proud of.

Well, our job was done, we'd set up everything, and so J~ went out to call for replacements. That was when all hell broke lose. Suddenly I was surrounded by a dozen kids aged 5-10.....the fair had opened!!!

" WOWEEEEE!!! I Want to write my name in HEENDI", shouted one....

and that set of a whole chorus of 'Me too's '....and I panicked!!!!.But then something struck me, In the land of the blind , the one eyed man is king. And that reasoning made me feel very very good!!. And mustering up all my 'hindi', I squeaked,

'Who wants their name written in Hindi, the national language of India',

and soon the Wayne's, the Zachary's, Amy's, Julia's and Linda's were all leaving the table, in joy claiming that they could now spell their names in Hindi. J~ returned after a while, and was amazed at the speed at which I was churning out 'hindi' names...but soon he was busy distorting names as well..

After the storm had passed,

J~ : Do you think ,that kid will ever find out that you spelt his name as 'Jakoory' instead of 'Zachary'.

Before we could exchange corrections, we were surrounded by yet another group of children, and we went about our ways, killing english names. But then all the equations changed when this very ABCD girl came up to the table with a kid and said,

'Look Rebecca, you can write your name in Hindi' ..

I wanted to say ' yes she can if she wants but we can't for sure', but senses prevailed and I quickly became very busy arranging stuff around/under/over the table. And so they moved over to J~'s side. And to top it, Rebecca turned out to be this 'I seek knowledge' kid, and asked ' What is hindi'..and the ABCD's girl reply...

'Oh!remember, I wrote your name in Sanskrit, this is a similar language'

...was enough to scare the bejusus out of J~.But I must say I did enjoy watching J~ squirm in his seat, beads of sweat forming in his forehead, trying to spell 'Rebecca'correctly..And finally after what seemed like a very long time, he succeeded in writing the name and they left. And now it was my turn...

' How did it go? Did you get Rebecca or Rebekaka?......

But I guess we'll never ever find out...and finally our replacements arrived, and Pandits S~ and J~ walked out heads held high. Besides, Whats in a name??

6 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

7:33 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I heard a different story from J~

7:41 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You should have impersonated our very own Sukhwinder ,probably the experience would have been more bearable:)!

2:01 AM  
Blogger ledsuki said...

Ah! Dear M~, long gone are the days of 'Sukhwinder'...:)....

11:03 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

there are no hindi or english "alphabets". hindi and english languages have an alphabet each and what u r refering to is letters of the alphabet. we leave hindi behind in a school canteen but we dont either catch up with our english

7:08 PM  
Blogger ledsuki said...

@ Anon - Thanks for the letting me in on that !! ..

6:35 PM  

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