Jul 8, 2009

Hinglish - from rags to riches

Hinglish is where most of the Indians start their journey of being a dude or a dudette. They are not the culprits. The culprits are those who use it to show-off or desperately try to match someone or something.

Hinglish is the result of a Ramchandar trying to enter a suave city mall; a stranger trying to strike a conversation with you in a 3A train compartment; an over-age uncle of yours trying to convince you to go for higher education; a small town Linkin Park and Shakira fan; a Parkaas scrapping the Brazilian hotties on Orkut; a rich and dumb trying to hoodwink the police .. and so on ...

There is one particular innocent incident which left me in splits recently. I hope you guys know about the 'Pepsi first ball ka captain' contest held in the recent World cup Cricket T-20. The Pepsi guys only managed to get some of the hardcore Desi winners at England. The first winner was Ravinder. Here's what happened:

The smooching Parrot Gautam Bhimani (ESPN-Star fame) stands at Lord's, at the center of the stadium. He has Jonty Rhodes with him. Our Ravinder was the Pepsi first ball ka captain. He was supposed to bowl to Rhodes before the match.

Gautam, sensing the Hinglish loaded Ravinder, started talking in Hindi suddenly. He spoke 4-5 lines in Hindi about Ravinder to make him feel comfortable. But then with his L-guard on, he dared to ask Ravinder to speak a few words about himself. Our Desi tycoon started with "I am Dilli from Ravinder". Right on the money!! .. Gautam's balls must have jumped inside, proving the L-guard useless.

Ravinder was unaware of his stomach churning blunder. He went on to speak more but Gautam pulled the mic back. Unfortunately, Gautam had to ask one more question about his bowling style against Rhodes. With a deep breath, he asked "bataiye Ravinder". There was still some gas left in the tank. Ravinder had prepared the answers, all in English. He said "Not the spin. Medium, I will medium, medium, medium" .. and the mic was pulled back before the fifth medium. "Thank you", said parrot. I am sure he meant 'Thank you lord'.

But why to blame Ravinder? Many Asian cricket captains and players haven't been that good with English either. Munaf Patel is barred from public speaking. Inzamam always praised his 'ladke'. Urdish, is it? Younis Khan confuses miles per hour with kilometers per hour. The list goes on and on here too.

But i believe that Cricketers should be given the license to be who they are. After all, English is not what you expect from them; neither from Ravinder, Ramchandar and Parkaas.

"Ek Jamfal". In Hindi it means 'One Guava'. In English it means nothing. In Hinglish it means 'Example'. Now this was said by the steel king Laxmi Mittal in an interview with Vir Sanghvi. He also used "who" instead of "which" to address about his company. Now that's where you have a problem !! .. come on billionaire, take some accent and grammar classes ..




4 Comments:

Sourabh said...

I wil give it Ho-hum :P
Arey where is your last blog...kachroo the rag picker...it was brilliant..did you deleated it....i can see only some of it in google reader

Vinay Sharma said...

hehe.. kachroo is up for some editing :) ..

Sugandha Gupta said...

btw I have changed the template now
jus see n leme kno how du u find it ??

Anonymous said...

nice post!