Language of India by Steve Bernard..Australian team Manager

[bongule]

Bore kodithe chadavandi... sSa_j@il sSa_j@il sSa_j@il sSa_j@il

The Commonwealth Games are over, and today’s papers in India have revealed a burying of various hatchets, and all are congratulating themselves and each other on a job well done.

Previous comments of ill will and blame have been replaced by laudatory messages to each other about the fantastic Games they had just put on.

I personally hope that it has been a success, as I believe that India does deserve credit and recognition, not just for the CWG, but for the way in which their country has taken on the challenge of modernisation, globalisation (if they’re considered good things) and a surge to the top of the tree in many aspects of the modern world’s success story.

It is still a country with a long way to go, but every time I come back here, and that is every year, I am amazed at how rapidly things are changing, and by the energy and drive of the people.

One thing that does truly amaze me is that although this is a country where English is considered the first language, nearly everyone I have met is capable of speaking a minimum of two languages if not half a dozen.

However, there are hundreds of dialects spoken in India, and I am sure that English is everyone’s second language.

The ODI squad training hard.
The ODI squad training hard.

I once arrived at Nagpur Airport in the middle of the day when doing a pre-tour visit of India prior to one of our tours.

When I got outside the terminal building, I saw a group of youngsters around 6 to 8 years of age, talking excitedly amongst themselves in a dialect I did not understand.

They were shabbily dressed and looked like children of the street.

I was with my boss, who was over-weight at the time (and still is), and one of the children obviously saw him as a man of means, and immediately bounded over to us.

I must have looked pretty ordinary because he ignored me, and he turned to my boss and asked “if possible would you have some money to spare sir” in perfect English.

My boss had a case of Delhi belly at the time and was not in the best of moods.

However, he grumblingly reached into his wallet and extracted an American dollar and gave it to the grateful beggar.

“Oh thank you very much sir, that is terrific”, he replied in perfect English, and bounded off up the street yelling and hollering to his mates about his good luck.

I was struck at the time about the irony of the situation, where a kid who was obviously not at school, spoke a local dialect and was it appeared , so adept in English.

An Indian friend of mine once told me that most Indian children who attend school will learn English, but where does a kid who is not educated learn it?

This Indian friend had once acted as our Liaison Officer when we were playing a match in Mumbai and after spending 10 days with us, he reckoned he spoke better English than half the members of the Australian team. It was probably more like 90 percent.

Mind you, some still grapple with English, especially when it is delivered by someone like myself with a broad (to an Indian) Australian accent.

I was sitting with my local Liaison Officer in some Indian city on a tour long ago, who was listening to me going through a number of points and issues that I needed clarified or resolved.

As I continued speaking to him, I noticed his eyes glazing over as he tried to keep pace with and comprehend the nonsense I was obviously going on with.

I stopped and said to him, “Rohit, you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, do you”? “No sir”, he replied, ” but just keep talking”.

While many Indians do speak excellent English, they have great trouble with those in our group who speak quickly, and who use slang.

They do, however, love to imitate you, which at times can be a bit disconcerting.

I recently called my local Liaison Officer, Mr Gopakumar, to my room to discuss changes to our schedule, given that monsoonal rain had fallen all night and our day’s training session had been cancelled as a result.

While we were going through the changes to the day’s schedule, I received a couple of calls from the office in Melbourne.

I probably spoke for around 10 minutes, with a mixture of business matters, and finished off the call to the office with “ok, talk to you later mate”.

Mr Gopakumar and I soon after finished off our discussions, and I promised to meet him at 6.00 pm to let him know if there would be any other changes to our movements.

As he walked from my room, he bade me farewell with “ok, talk to you later mate”.

At a Test match in Chennai in 1998, the team meandered off to the dining room for lunch on day one.

I had met with the chef earlier in the day, and although his English was a bit mangled, it was better than my Hindi, so he and I talked about his proposed dishes for lunch in English.

I struggled to understand everything he was saying, but he assured me all would be well at lunchtime because he would place signs next to each dish in English so we would know what we were eating.

A couple of minutes after the players had gone to the dining room for their lunch, I was alarmed to see them returning to the dressing room en masse and feared the chef had prepared a luncheon that did not agree with all tastes, and the players had mutinied.

However, the boys were all reaching into their bags for their cameras, and were legging it back to the dining room in a stampede.

I went off to the dining area to see what was happening, and found a bemused chef watching suspiciously as the players took photos of the sign next to one particular dish.

A closer inspection showed that he had labeled one of the dishes as “chicken spew” instead of “chicken stew”.

I was about to close off my blog on that note, but as I was finishing off the doorbell to my hotel room rang, and upon opening the door, I was confronted by a widely smiling house boy who was returning my laundry.

“Here is your laundry sir, and would it be true that you may indeed have a spare ticket to the match ”.

As I have written before, tickets are the universal currency and language of the staff in all the hotels we stay in while in India.

“Indeed that is true” I said, and handed him one of the few I had left that hadn’t been passed on to Rufus my Liaison Officer.

It turns out Kochi was once Rufus’s home town, and it seems he has 20 very close relatives who would be overjoyed for the opportunity to attend the match which was unfortunately abandoned due to the wet conditions.

Rufus also told me that unsurprisingly, the Hindi word for ticket is ticket, so you don’t even have to be multilingual in India to ask for a ticket.

Anyway, asking for tickets is in the DNA of all Indians I believe, and is as natural as burping and passing wind.

[Sanjay Sahu]

Idantha chadivithe bore kottela undi @3$%

[bongule]

[quote author=Sanjay Sahu link=topic=111780.msg1187396#msg1187396 date=1287761722]
Idantha chadivithe bore kottela undi @3$%
[/quote][img]http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/5434/venkybrahmi.gif[/img] adem ledhu baa...baagane undi about emerging growth of india, vaadi angle lo cheppadu

[Sanjay Sahu]

[quote author=Nemo link=topic=111780.msg1187405#msg1187405 date=1287761871]
[img]http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/5434/venkybrahmi.gif[/img] adem ledhu baa...baagane undi about emerging growth of india, vaadi angle lo cheppadu
[/quote]
@gr33d mama.. but topic chaala lengthy ga undi[img width=110 height=99]http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Vk2UBmPzrGg/S6wB26_vikI/AAAAAAAAA40/RFeqonQFNUg/s128/brahmam16.gif[/img]

[sunilgadu]

[quote author=Sanjay Sahu link=topic=111780.msg1187434#msg1187434 date=1287762309]
@gr33d mama.. but topic chaala lengthy ga undi[img]http://lh3.ggpht.com/_Vk2UBmPzrGg/S6wB26_vikI/AAAAAAAAA40/RFeqonQFNUg/s128/brahmam16.gif[/img]
[/quote]

@gr33d  start chesaaa ...bundi kanii.....padi linla kante ekkuva savalante bore kottindi.... sSc_hiding2 sSc_hiding2


but i can say its a *=: *=: