HIGHLIGHTS OF THE MONTH

Recently my cousin Raju from the US (who is, what else?-- a brainy techie south-Indian fellow working for Google) came on a visit to Chennai. This time Raju was a man with a mission. Armed with his camera, Raju wanted to go sight-seeing around town; not my city's proud landmarks like Fort St George and Marina Beach, but my city's proud painted signages-- in our own variety of English. Or rather Chenglish.

So we set off in my car, and crawled through the by-lanes of Triplicane filled with many places serving tiffin and meals. "There it is!!" yelled Raju suddenly. And went click click click with his camera, taking pictures to show his American girlfriend back in California. The object of his search: the sign-board he'd seen on his last visit here: "Kailash Restorant. Hot Mutton Pups daily".

Now animal rights activists may well be alarmed wondering if this is how Chennai's corporation deals with the stray dog menace. Not to worry: the hotel owner was merely advertising "mutton puffs"?pronounced and written the Tamil way. (Neither was mutton pups a smaller portion of the desi hot dog?).

And while on the subject of dogs, we also fervently hoped that "Paw Bhaji", listed under North Indian items on the menu, had nothing to do with a poor doggy's feet.Well! Just another example of good old Chennai spellings -- by someone who wrote English exactly like he spoke it, in South India.

Now you can't really blame us, as it's all our mothers' fault. Or rather, our mother- tongue's fault, because when baby Tamilians learn their alphabet from their moms, they find that one particular letter pronounced 'pa' , could well be 'pa' or 'ba' or even 'fa'... So if a jolly waiter in a Chennai hotel specializing in Naarth Indian items, asks you if you'd like some Jabadhi, (as written on their menu) do say a hasty 'No' and stick to dosas. That mysterious dish is actually the humble chapatti, spelt the Tamil way?with our knack for liberally adding wherever possible, the letter 'h' (pronounced yech, of course). In fact for our southern purists, Hindi never quite sounds like Hindi, unless you spell it as Hindhi.

Our unabashed experiments with bashing up English phonetics began quite early in the South?for it was in Madras that the British began their empiring in India-- setting up the East India Company at Fort St George near our sea shore. And just as they stole and modified some of our Tamil words and made them theirs?(like 'milagu thani' or pepper water (rasam) which became a fancy sounding 'mulligatawny soup'), it seemed fair and square that we too simplified the English foods they introduced to us. Like 'Bred-Butter-Armlet' that is standard fare in many roadside shacks that cater to the continental preferences of auto drivers.

But while bread may have been conveniently shortened to bred (why have a letter that is of no use in that word?), when it come to our names, anything to lengthen it out a bit more, seems to be the rule. We like our names stretched out nice and long. Filling up US immigration forms for us could take ages, as we write under Full Name: Arumugamangalam Shivabalasubramaniam Ananthapadhmanabhan (even if it's simply 'Anto' to friends back home in Palo Alto).

Speaking of Indians in foreign countries... there is a happy paradox to our spelling abilities here. Perhaps it is the mastery over spelling their complicated Indian names correctly, even as small children, that somehow has resulted in this amazing fact: Indian-origin kids, especially South-Indian, continue to win the famed US Spelling Bee contest year after year. If asked if he or she can spell 'psittacism', our genius spelling whiz is not going start doing a head wiggle in the manner of most typical South Indians: an action that could mean both yes and no?but stoically work it out in their heads first, and then get every alphabet of that word correct. Being just 12 years old and standing before a worldwide live TV audience, glibly spelling out 'ecossaise' or, as in last year's winning word, 'stromuhr', is really no big deal.

Meanwhile back in India, my other southie neighbours in the bordering States too have their easy, jolly way of writing down what they speak, when they use English words. So one shouldn't be alarmed if, for a friend's wedding in Kerala, you find they are going to have 'Pope Music' at the celebration party. You are not going to be listening to holy chants all evening, but swinging away to the latest numbers, as what they mean, of course, is pop music.

Though when I saw this signage at an ice cream stall in Cochin, I wasn't quite sure if I was reading the name of a popular chocolate ice cream, or if it was the name of the Malayali owner of the stall, as it said: 'Chacko Bar'. Our Andhra neighbours may be leading in the IT race, with the invasion of several English speaking countries setting up shop on their streets, not to mention contemporary foods from the West, but the locals here still crave for their own hot hot spicy spicy Andhra thali meals. Then again: was it the owner's name here, or another case of merry misspelling --in this hotel sign board I have seen in Hyderabad: "MEALS REDDY" ??

And next door to my State, the Karnataka government may have snubbed the English by chucking out their anglicized 'Bangalore" and going back to their old original name Bengaluru, but tailor shops continue to happily use English in signages, like this one in Fraser Town that draws chuckles from every foreign tourist: "Krishna Rao Mahadick. Expert in Ladies Fittings".

So if the Queen of England ever visits our cities' by lanes, she will discover for herself that in her former colony, English is very much alive and er?unwell. As in these credentials for a rather dubious wayside doctor's clinic in Tamil Nadu: "Even those couple who do not have children for along 25 years will get children after our checkup and taking our medecine. The following diseases are treate perfectly. Headache. Kneepain. Paravisis. Eyediseasez."

Maybe we Southies need immediate treatment for our English too!

(Indu Balachandran is the author of the book, The Oops and Downs of Advertising.)