Budding genius

Here's the latest gem I picked up while marking an essay written by a 15-year old who is supposed to be 'good in science'... Stephen Hawkins is the world's greatest astrologer.

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Strange are the ways of abuse!

I often muse aloud in class about the oddities of language, especially when it comes to invective and abuse. When a Bengali is irritated with someone's obduracy, he says "kochupora khao", though there is nothing harmful or disgusting about that particular humble vegetable, especially if it is cooked well (by the way, google could not translate 'kochu' for me: will somebody help?) And shuorer bachchha (offspring of a pig) is supposed to be even harsher than son of a bitch, although most of us love piglets and dogs, or at least see nothing very hateful about them. Nobody considers son of a lion an insult, though (and the expression is little used anyway), and nobody calls another son of a squirrel or something like that. Does anybody have a theory about this?

Will India finally conquer English, then?

Oh, wow, the visit counter has crossed the 30,000 mark without my noticing it! That means a goodly number of people are reading this blog, too. It's  a pity that comments are few and far between. I guess most visitors just come to this page, get their daily laugh or grin or grimace, and then leave, without bothering to let me know what they felt about it. I wish some would share a few laughs now and then...

By the way, how do you carry on teaching English in a country where a college prof says something is called 'bizarre' because it makes a 'bizz-ing' noise, and a schoolteacher says 'I have two daughters and both are girls'? And only this afternoon I saw an astrologer advertizing 'gnyaan-tips' on TV. I kid you not.

Matrimonial howlers

Going through the matrimonial columns of the newspapers is one of our hilarious pastimes on Sunday afternoons. Apart from the fact that it tells us a great deal about how petty, greedy, foolish, habit-bound and generally cussed people actually are behind all their workaday pretensions, they are always good for a few belly laughs. Here’s a tiny selection of ads from today’s edition of Bartaman:

The girls usually always call themselves fair-skinned, pretty, ‘homely’ and ‘convent-educated’, of course  (no matter how dark, ugly, unpleasant and dumb they might actually be) and almost universally seek grooms who are dah/ih/sho. cha (daktar/engineer/sorkari chakurey), no matter whether they look like apes and behave even worse. But here are some that really take the cake. One prospective groom touts the fact that he is a teetotaler (seems to be his only virtue), declares that he hardly earns anything, and that he’s willing to marry anybody, just so long as his father in law puts him up permanently (a ghorjamai: he’s quite candid about it). Another who is 45 declares that he looks no older than 37, and touts his Rs. 26,000 a month clerkship in a government aided school as though that’s as good as being a millionaire playboy. Yet a third who by his own admission makes just about Rs. 3000 a month (I paid my driver more than that!) generously says that he will ‘accept’ any bride, so long as she is willing to keep him in her father’s house. A girl in her mid-30s who proudly announces she has studied upto class three is looking for an ‘established’ groom.

After we had stopped hiccupping with laughter, my wife, daughter and I thought it would be nice to write down some such ad for me, if I were to put myself on the marriage market again (did I tell you that a couple of years ago the rumour had gone around that I was divorced, and I had started receiving lucrative offers for a second marriage already?) Both of them insisted I'd be deluged with requests...