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!!