The Thoda/Thodi incident!!

The Thoda/Thodi incident!! (Not to be confused with Choura Chouri incident !!)

Hindi has always been a nightmare for me, just like it is ,for a majority of South Indians who either kick off speaking or speeding up their Hindi when it’s really considered obligatory, as in when you get into the corporate world or when you catch a northie girlfriend (or a southie girlfriend who is fluent in Hindi ;-) ) or if u r staying in a pg where all your out-of-state roommates speak shuddh Hindi and giggle at u when you wake up and say ‘subah ho gaya’ , they mockingly rectify it, saying ‘subah hogayi ,maamu’ . At least for me, my memoirs linked with Hindi are disgustingly embarrassing and so have I laid a foundation for a ‘Five Year Plan’ , titled ‘Operation PremChand’, that aims at accomplishing the following three objectives within 6 years from now.

1. To become a fluent Hindi speaker. (Again, not to be confused with LokSabha speaker or lavish Bose speaker)

2. To make sure that I achieve what I have said in the first objective just above.

3. And to make sure that I realize the second and third points.

Having had a clear-cut roadmap of what I was required to do, I embarked my 6 year epic journey last month and so far, it’s been so worse! I mean, I truly marvel how those who are fluent in Hindi deal with those gender things so off the cuff! I have inquired a lot of people, but yet haven’t been able to hit upon a better breakdown than , ‘by practice’. Oh my God! A clear analogy with the situation of a new joinee to a software company that hasn’t believed in documentation. My ex-roommate, who is a native of Allahabad, that day was very enthusiastic and wholehearted in explaining me how to differentiate between genders.

“Look AD, I will tell you a simple formula. You just follow them and see how effortless it is. All words ending with ‘i’ as in GHADI, NADI and so forth are all Streeling”, he declared and I thought he had given me the much needed breakthrough with that proclamation.

“Wow, cool… All? “ , I asked excitedly .

“All of them, as far as I know”, he defended.”I haven’t come across any ‘i’ ending pulling shabd. Cant u make out man, that it sounds awfully jarred when those words become pulling?”.

“Ok.. Then, is this correct? Aadmi chal rahi hai???” , I countered sarcastically.

“Aah, listen Anoop. Everything will have exceptions and Hindi is not an exception”, he said and bunged his lectures.

Whatever, I adopted that formula and draw on that even now and 90% of the times, it has worked. :)

Subsequently, I came across numerous such situations where I could not surmise if it should be ka/ki or tha/thi . In the views of psychiatrist Dr.Hannibal Lecter of ‘Silence Of The Lambs’ fame, this particular bare state of mind where it attempts to deduce the gender of a genderless entity, is termed “KAKI-THATHI agendero syndrome“, for which practice is the only remedy.

My struggling with that syndrome was still ongoing when I had another embarrassing encounter, this time, a more intricate one with a more complex phrase.

Me and my mentor Shalini were analyzing a critical bug in a module, putting traces after traces and keeping our eyes wide open in front of the monitor screen. I was not knowing those processes that accurately then and hence she was doing the major tasks as I used to sit beside her and watch the tremendous pace with which her fingers hit the keys of that keyboard. Even today, I am of the opinion that if someone presents her a piano, she will surely bring out, either the best heavy-death-metal-rock-song tune or the keys of the piano themselves.

Having said these, one evening when we were working on that, she looked a bit annoyed and said “Output thodi aa rahi hain”.

I could not presume what was the maamla.

After a few minutes, she recompiled and re-ran and cryid again, “ Yeh output thodi aa rahi hai” !

This time I could not hold out. I humbly asked her, “yeh output thodi thodi kyun aa rahi hain, ek saat kyun nahin aati??”.

With all apprehensions and tensions and deadlines nested in her mind, she could not feel the air of innocence in my question and gave a strict impulsive reply which was something like this:

“What’s this Anoop? Don’t you know these are atomic state-machines and semaphores are bound to them?.. You should understand these basics Anoop, else you cant get the system level understanding. When an atomic change happens, a listener class opens up automatically and gets destroyed only when the thread dies, haven’t I told you?”.

“My God”, I thought, what had I asked?? I had just converted what she had told in an assertive sentence into an interrogative sentence. I was scared and never spoke that evening again.

Last week when we were having our evening snacks in office, I casually narrated that incident to another colleague here and exemplified Shalini saying how people become short tempered and start speaking something disparate and non-sense when they are under pressure. All of a sudden, she started laughing hard and certified that my Hindi is inconceivably poor and hopeless!

Only when she told the reason did I come to know about the weird and wonderful, yet mysterious behavior of the word “thodi” in Hindi!!!

“My dear boy, thodi means less, that’s true. But ‘Output thodi aa rahi hain’ means no output”, she elaborated. “This is very much in practice. Like, when I want to say, something is told by her and not me, I say , ‘ Maine thodi boli, usne boli’ “.

Oh my holy God, a twist. A twist that seemed a twist only to me! Not even in my craziest of the dreams had I imagined that a word called ‘thodi’ enclosed ‘utni badi’ connotations!! I opine that the best example for an object oriented language is not java or cpp, but Hindi. I mean, seriously, what was it if not polymorphism? :P

That day, I came to know how Hindi hides in itself, scores of such fantasies! I could relate this Thoda-thodi incident to the colonial Chaura-Chouri incident wherein the British controlled police mistook an Indian mob for extremists and opened fire, while the mob had mistaken that Indian police force for british officers with arms!

I truly had never thought that one day Hindi will challenge my technical (in)abilities about semaphores!!

The chronicles of Koramangala !! Part-1:

This is a work of ‘TRUE FICTION’:

Astrology has been an integral part of my life, from the very day I entered this planet unwillingly (yes, I’m a descendant of Caesar) to this date! My mother, aunt, grandma and a few other feminine characters of my family believe in astrology to the core of it and do seek out the suggestion of our “Family Astrologer” ahead of performing any major alterations!! So when I was about to move to Bengaluru for work, his counsel was predictably sought and that was the one damn thing which made me end up in this posh, modish exorbitant koramangala locality that is situated in the liver of this city (yes, it’s a bit far-off from the heart of the city!!). For he is the one who flagged dismissively that I bore “MANGALA DOSHAM” ( curse of planet Mangala) and in order to trounce it , I be required to reside either in “nelaMANGALA” or in “koraMANGALA” only!! I thought it was coherent to settle in liver of the city rather than in nelaMANGALA, the foot of the city and thus, I wrecked up here!! Thank God I dint have the curse of Lord Raama, for then he would have commanded me to hang about in C.V.Raaman Nagar!!

Just like Kaashi lies on the banks of Ganga and Shimoga on Tunga , Koramangala lies on the banks of … the city’s biggest and the nastiest gutter! This gargantuan open-ventilated trench that surges towards Indiranagara , Domlur and quite a few other ‘Paalyas’ and ‘Sandraas’ before uniting with the main drainage, appears even more appalling than its counterpart of the illustrious Slumdog Millionaire’s Dhaaravi slum!! Regardless of this ,Koramangala has been trendy enough to catch the real estate boom, ornamented itself with some of the best in the town arcades, in which list come the celebrated Forum mall, Raheja Arcade, NGV , Lifestyle Oasis and numerous spencers and spars and big-bazaars and needless to cite, an ample number of software companies have also surfaced. The ‘SHOPPING MALLS’ , btw, have become a sensational hit among both boys and girls, for , if girls go there for SHOPPING, boys go there for MAALS ;)!!

Well, if that facet gave you about koramangala, the notion of a spoilt neighborhood, hold on for a moment!! Because even in streets where realty rates have touched skies, there are a lot of temples too, which are so heavily teeming all the time that it makes you feel if these many people have guilt-conscience! Whatever, it’s truly a good sign that we are not yet ripped off from our cultural roots en masse. Similar to shopping malls, few spacious patrician temples also somehow have become a thing of thumbs-up among both boys and girls.

This is how I can portray koramangala to you.. I don’t really know which smiley I’ve to put after the line, “I stay in koramangala” , :) or :( . Maybe this is more germane “:-)=$$$$$$“ , implying that you can be happy here and get high on iff you have enough dollars in every part of you!

Having given an epigrammatic foreword about the place I stay, let me start narrating some colorful as well as some pathetic experiences I had here since my arrival, one by one, with the first among them, in this very post!

——- “ The Badam Milk Split Up “——

Let me be a bit frank this time, in saying that I’m not a spendthrift. Haven’t spent too much on any particular thing which I deem unworthy or if it seems to me as a dead-investment. Nonetheless, I should concede that koramangala has been triumphant in changing this demeanor of mine to a considerable extent. Yes, the place is a pretty penny where a film in Forum on weekends won’t come for less than 300, 400 bucks, a masala dosa for not less than 40, and a house for monthly rent at … better I keep it to myself. All I can say is that in a very near future, you will not be able to declare a variable like this:

int monthly_house_rent_koramangala ;

GCC will throw an out of bound error! You will be needing a long int.

But during my initial days here, I was oblivious of all these facts and figures and never carried more that Rs.100 with me many a times while going out! One scorching day, when sun was so harsh that no ponds cream could put up with, I was returning to my room from Forum, felt very thirsty and wished to have a glass of cold badam milk in some hotel nearby. I pierced into a heavily crowded token system hotel, with great difficulty , pushed my hands near the token counter amidst other tens of hands which craved for dosas and idlis and a varied selection of other items. I handed him an unsullied 50 Rs note and asked for cold badam milk. He, in next to no time, put the money in the drawer, tore the receipt, gave me the token and moved to another customer with the same pace.

I thought, in the rush of the next customer he should have forgotten to render me the change and waited for 2-3 minutes to ask him when he finds some air to breath in. When the crowd never seemed to lessen, I decided to raise him for my change somehow in that swarm itself, and looked at the receipt to know how much he had owed me. Well, u should have already anticipated by now, that to my dismay, the receipt threw a curve at me as it showed that a glass of cold badam milk was tagged at 50 Rs!!!! God, where have you put me in, I thought. Nevertheless, I soothed myself saying that I was going to drink the costliest badam milk of my lifetime and perceptibly expected a really luscious n a flavorsome cup of it. But when I had the first sip, from that medium sized cup what he had offered, I felt that to be no better than the 8 Rp badam milk that we used to enjoy in the corner shop besides our hostel in Mysore!! Regrettably, I was in koramangala then and if I did a hasty micro-economical analysis of the badam milk cost split up, I would have found that hardly Rs.3 had gone on milk, Re.1 on Badam and sugar, 1 for refrigeration and the rest 45 was on the grounds that I had that in a place which is beset with young software engineers and well-heeled, born to the purple businessmen who think that reserve bank prints INR only in 3 denominations, of 1000, 500 and occasionally 100 !!

Whatsoever, although at times this gives the intuition of being a good course, as it a causative for the decentralization of wealth, in contrast, as they say, has really an alarming influence on the recklessly escalating cost-of-living in koramangala. I feel it’s high time we realize this and kick the ballistics before it’s too late!