72 - ENGLISH VINGLISH, MARATHI SWARATHI, HINDI FINDI......

English is perhaps the only language that has an upper case and a lower case.  After a fullstop, a capital letter is used, and proper nouns too have a capital letter.  In Marathi, Hindi, Urdu, Gujarati, etc there is no need to use capitals. Also the pronunciation of every word is not too predictable.  Very often English words are pronounced incorrectly,  which is not the case with most other languages as the written word can be read as is.

 In India, most of the citizens are not familiar with English speaking and so they tend to translate from marathi or hindi, and then format the english sentence, which leads to hilarious sentences.  So if  the Hindi phrase of  'Aap kaiseh hai?'  gets translated as 'You how are?'

If you do not read good novels and classical stories,  then you are at risk to format incorrect sentences too.  Spellings also go for a toss.  I have been very puzzled after perusing certain items on a menu.  So there is  a "paper sandwich"  correct spelling should have been "pepper",  and the "chess sandwich" meaning a "cheese sandwich".    And these two misspellings were painted on the menu board of the Mumbai university at Kalina.

Everyday I pass the Aditya Birla school lane at Tardeo and feel chagrined to read the signboard that they have displayed at the entrance of the lane leading towards their school.  It reads, 'School children alighting and get off.'  In Pune there is a bench on MG Road which has this painted on it 'siniour citizen bench'.  In a Virar local,. the neon light message reads 'Emergency number of ladies passengers.............'.  One Union Bank branch has this message displayed, 'Account will be freeze in case of non submission of KYC'.

And I fail to understand why the BMC has painted an English phrase in the Hindi script on its garbage trucks,  'clean up'?  Also, the hindi and marathi words for 'please',   'sorry'  and 'thank you' are almost redundant, and everyone uses the english options, even when conversing in a colloquial format or in any local language like gujarati, marathi and hindi.

Very often, the speaker makes a mistake, and the listeners are unaware of its incorrectness, so 'all is well'.

32 - TERESA MY FRIEND

Teresa is a name that belongs to an icon of Kolkota.  Mother Teresa will be canonised on 4th September 2016.  Her maiden name was Anjeze Gonxhe Bojaxhia,  so complicated to pronounce,  and so she chose a path of service to the poorest of the poor,  a path that is complicated and gruelling.

A few years ago,  I saw a man on the Kemps corner slope,  lying on one side of the road, in the hot afternoon sunlight, and a rat was nibbling  his toes.  It is a very busy road, and thousands of vehicles were driving past.   I assumed that he was dead, until he flickered his eyes.   What could I do?  I could not touch him or even talk to him, because I was so rattled at his state.  I returned home and phoned the BMC, assuming that the municipal authorities would have some sort of rescue tactics in place.  But they replied that,  'we do not pick up sick persons from the road,  we have no provision for such acts.  Please phone "the sisters'  of mercy".
And I phoned them and within an hour,  their van came to the site and carried the sick man away.  In that moment,  my respect for the Christians increased.

Since then,  there have been many occasions, when I have wished that I could have had the compassion and the guts to do what Mother  Teresa did,  to physically and emotionally,  help the poorest of the poor.  But I have befriended another Teresa,  who herself is the poorest of the poor. 

In reality, this Teresa has befriended me.  She lives on the footpath and ekes out a living by collecting, segregating and selling 'radd-deeh'.  All the shops along both sides of the street are her means of procuring  cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, used bubble wrap,  wooden supports etc.
She sweeps a few upper floor homes, in return for leftover food and old clothes.  She washes their toilets and bathrooms, in return for permission to use them when she has to.  But the most laudable thing about this Teresa is that she helps herself and she is always smiling for me.  I am just a woman she meets at the bus stop,  until my bus arrives.  She approaches me whenever she is nearby and strikes up a conversation in perfect English.  Her saree is  a faded, sometimes tattered, hand-me-down,  but she sports nail paint and bangles and a mobile.  The nailpaint is courtesy the nick-nack selling shop that she swabs, and whose garbage bins she clears.  The mobile is an old model that the owner wanted to replace,  from one of the homes she sweeps.

She has no home, and takes shelter on the shop steps, after they are shut.  She has a twenty year old son,  who helps her.   But it is sad that he has no education and no support to learn and earn a respectable livlihood.  He is doing drugs with some other bad elements off the streets. 

Teresa asked me for a favour once,  and I made an effort, to fulfill it, but in vain.   She requested me to help her open a bank account, so that she could save her hard earned money.  But a bank needs an Aadhar card,  and an Aadhar card needs an address, and an address needs a house,  which Teresa does not own.  And so I could not help her to get a bank account.  And the situation has not improved for the poorest of the poor,  no matter what promises our Prime minister Mr.Modi boasts about.  And aslo petty politicians, who being in the vicinity, do nothing to improve the lot of humans around them,,,,, Mr. Owaisi for example.  But then he may wish to only help his own community,  I presume.

But this has not caused any rift in her friendship towards me.  She continues to smile and chitchat with me, as long as I wait for my bus, at this bus stop.