Your Friendly Philosopher & Guide

Having brought up in Mumbai, 4 languages were made compulsory to me - English, Hindi, Marathi at School, and Tamil at home. I learnt Malayalam too, not out of any special interest, but by watching those soft porn movies every week during my college days.

To complete my degree I had to move to Coimbatore, and when I reached there all I knew was a language that was a mixture of all the 4 languages. Whatever Tamizh (Mother tongue) I knew was the language my mom spoke to us, and the language that is spoken in Tamizh movies. Hence I knew very less about foul words or profane usage.

In one of our classes, to explain some chemical reaction our professor took the example of the division in Islam. He said, “Islam is divided into two major sections – Sunny & Shiite.” I was just wondering, why is he pronouncing (sunni) ‘soon nee’ as ‘sun nee’? After the class was over I asked one of the guys, “why does the professor pronounce it wrong?” He burst into laughter and started debating with me that it is ‘sun nee’ only and not ‘soon nee’ as I was saying. Others laughed at me too, though I knew for sure that they were all wrong. What offended me was their laughter. They laughed every time I said it was ‘soon nee’ and not ‘sun nee’ – it was later I was told that in Tamizh ‘sun nee’ means man’s dick! Probably the professor deliberately avoided to pronounce it right to save embarrassment in front of 37 guys & 13 girls!

Pronunciation of different words to a very large extent depends on the language you know first or you are trained into first. And most people give priority to their mother tongue, and compare all the other words with their own language. If you notice, most Tamilians will pronounce Bedi of Kiran Bedi or Pooja Bedi as ‘Bay Dee’ and not ‘Bay Thee’. Though the spelling sounds ‘Bay Dee’, the actual pronunciation is ‘Bay Thee’. Well Tamilians would argue against me, because ‘Bay Thee’ in Tamizh means loose motion!

You need to live in Mumbai to experience the funny things that go around you day in and day out. There are four places in India, which people hate to live first. And once they live for 3 months, they are so addicted to those places that no other place impresses them – they essentially are Mumbai, Pune, Delhi & Bangalore.

There are special electric trains for ladies during the early hours in Mumbai. Two Maharashtrians were on the platform, and they were unaware about the train being a special one for women. They were running fast to catch the train, and the guy running behind suddenly listened to the announcement that was made. He understood that it was a special train, and started yelling to his friend running in front of him, “fuck the ladeej (ladies), fuck the ladeej (ladies)”. The whole platform burst into laughter. In fact both the guys were innocent, and they didn’t know much of English. ‘Fakth’ in Marathi means ‘only’, and these special trains are announced as, ‘fakth striyaansathi.’ And one of the guys was just attempting to learn English by at least saying ladeej (ladies) for ‘striyaansathi.’ The best part was to see the embarrassment on few educated women’s face, who boarded the train after this guy’s announcement!