Story of my Origin - born Tamilian, celebrated my first birthday in Kerala, spent rest of 15 years in NCR, next 9 years were spent in Karnataka, married to a Malayali and back to NCR. This not only makes me multi cultured, but also multilingual. I'm good with Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu and Hindi. So are my parents.
Now this capability has also landed us many a times in a funny situation. To state some of them, when my mother had just began learning Hindi, she used to goto super market and ask for Moti(pearl) instead of Methi. My granny had a great broken Hindi vocabulary. Once she went on a rikshaw and udhar jao was the only words she used in giving directions, every now and then poking rikshaw puller's back. Granny dear's Hindi was responsible for driving away 3 of our maids. My dad till date has a confusion on 'main, hum,tu,aap'. Once a colleague of his asked him where their boss was, my dad being an expert in Hindi (or so he thought) said hum aagaye,par manager abhi aayega(respect to self only). One common confusion which every south Indian will agree about Hindi is identification of gender of an object. For e.g., Pencil is a female, Pen is a male( really!!!).
Cut to Karnataka, my mom and dad were now busy learning the language. Granny never tried Kannada, she learnt it from her experience;). So dad took us to vegetable market(me n my bro still hadn't learnt Kannada). He would bargain perfectly and get all the vegetables. Wow!! We were impressed. In the next few months, me n bro were good with the language and so was my mom. Again a visit to vegetables market. Dad again took the lead. He had a standard dialogue aidu rupaige kodi ( give it for five rupees), and we realized it was irrespective of what amount the shopkeeper said. If he said a kilo was for 2 Rs, my father still wanted it for 5!!!
Next was my mum, she once called up her friend in Delhi and started conversing in Tamil. It then became a point to think before any call. Once a neighbor asked my mom nimge hubba ideya ( do you celebrate this function). For some reason my mom thought hubba meant holiday, so she replied maklige hubba ide namage illa (my kids have the function but not me and my husband), leaving our neighbor wondering on what it meant!!!
Latest is me. I learnt Malayalam after marriage. One day my mother-in-law, who is also my malayalam teacher, said idana kalayaradu (do not throw it). Me being a learner, knew the meaning of idana(this) and kalayan (throw) and I translated it to 'throw this'. By the time my MIL was back, the thing was disposed off ;). Thankfully maa understood and at times still understands my language chaos!
In spite of all this, I love being multilingual, love following all the cultures and hope to improvise and learn more languages.
One of my favorite Spanish Quotes 'Que Sera Sera' means 'what will be, will be'. This quote is so true. I may sound a bit philosophical but wanted to write this for quite some time now. There is a lot being said about being positive, dreaming and attracting what one wants,about not being broken on not getting what one wants. So many books are being sold on such topics and no doubts they make sense. Out of experience, I have realized that the base behind every advice is that what has to happen, will happen. One can't stop it. But one needs to accept what has happened and act accordingly. When a book talks about attracting what you want (say a bungalow), one can't just sit and keep dreaming. Actions need to be according to the intended goal. In achieving the said goal, we are sure to encounter a lot of obstacles. Beauty lies in facing them and planning the next steps. The world is actually a classroom, with each one being your peer and life is a very tough t...
Hilarious.......
ReplyDeleteThis was a good one.. :-D I could visualize amma killing tamil when we r at dad's place, nd her funny Hindi in front of frnds.. :-P
ReplyDelete@Heena,
DeleteSo true ;)