Nylon Sev

Just what is nylon sev? I assume it’s a regional speciality and not a pair of stockings from the Harrods lingerie department. (Review of The Oberoi-Penguin Celebrity Cookbook, Hindustan Times, 24 February, 2000)

Sev is the familiar crunch fried snack made from gram flour. It can be thick as noodles, or more commonly, thin as vermicelli. These days, with the use of modern sev extruders (yes, these things exist), manufacturers can churn out sev that is finer still. Imagine 'hair type thin namkeen': doesn't that make your mouth drool? Superfine nylon sev is what they're serving in the best Gujarati households these days, along with the cocktail samosas and the macaroni chaat. There was a time when 'disco' was the word tagged on to every novelty food item (remember disco papads and disco papayas?). But now it looks like 'nylon' has taken its place: out there in the khau gallis of India, you can find nylon poha, nylon khaman dhoklas, nylon papdi and doubtless many more such synthetic marvels.

Before the fall

Interesting essay by Ramachandra Guha on bilingualism in the pre-Hinglish generation.

Something black in the lentils

'Something black in the lentils' is a facetiously literal translation of the Hindi idiom 'daal mein kuchh kaala hai', which is the Indian way of saying there's something fishy going on. The earliest use of the phrase I remember is from the 1975 film Prem Kahani, which featured an Anglicized character (did he play Mumtaz's father?) who was fond of pointing out that there was 'something black in the doll'. The phrase is sometimes rendered in English as 'something black in the lentil soup', as in the title of this book by Reshma S. Ruia: an inaccurate translation, since it assumes that the daal is of the cooked variety. As any cook will tell you, there's always a lot of black stuff in lentil soup.

The lover is so afflicted with envy/jealousy that he's convinced that 'there's something black in the daal' [that is, there's some cause for suspicion].(A Desertful of Roses: website by Frances W. Pritchett, Columbia University)

Methinks there is something wrong in the state of denmark, something black in the daal, etc. (Post to Spoon Collective mailing list Seminar 13,10 Jan 1996)

Definitely something black in the lentils, here. And that my dear Elysa Gardner is a synonym for jealousy in Hindi. (Shobha De, Outsourcing dreams, The Times of India,May 23, 2004)

There must be some catch, some red herring, some blue oyster or something black in the lentils that would thwart my dreams.(Rohit Gupta,The Rs 5,00,000 blank cheque, Mid-day, January 2003)

At one point Shekhar is left behind on a school trip, but using his super-speed, Shekhar actually manages to beat Verma and Gita to their destination. Seeing Shekhar there, Verma comments, "There is something black in my lentils." (Review of Superman [India, 1987],Stomp Tokyo)

The black in this lentil soup is represented by Pran who has designs on her fortune and on her person. (Jerry Pinto, Time Out Mumbai, November 5-18, 2004)

The original Hindi phrase is also commonly used in Hinglish, especially in gossip columns and filmi magazines.

All I can say is that there seems to be kuch kala in the dal. Some black in the lentil, as they say at home.(Pamela Philipose, Indian Express, November 26, 2001)

Dal mein kala in mid-day meal scheme (Headline in Indian Express, April 28, 1999)

Amid picturesque background and marvelous camera work, the two fall in love. Now comes the daal mein kaala. Enter Sonali Kulkarni, who is Khan’s wife..(Review of Pyaar Tune Kya Kiya by sonia, Mouthshut.com)

Powertoni

One of the characteristics of Indian English that sets it apart from British or American English is the manner in which it mixes registers of language. We are ruled by babus, and their jargon has made its way into our everyday speech. For instance, issueless would be considered legalese in most varieties of English, but in India you will find it used rather casually in matrimonial advertisements.

Some legal and administrative jargon has been borrowed into Indian languages in a corrupted form, especially in street slang where the original English phrase may undergo a significant shift in meaning.

Hapichole is Singlish for ‘habitual’, but the word has undergone a semantic restriction. In its original application it may have been used in some set phrase as ‘habitual offender’, but now, standing alone, it describes a good-for-nothing, a vagabond, a parasite, a hanger-on.

(Arjuna Parakrama, Dehegemonizing language standards)

Another such word is powertoni, a keyword in Suketu Mehta's account of Mumbai politics and society. This is a corruption of 'power of attorney'; according to Mehta, its street meaning goes beyond the accepted legal definition to stand for 'the only kind of power that a politician has, a power of attorney ceded to him by the voter'.

'The ministers are ours,' he said. 'The police are in our hands. They cooperated during the riots. If anything happens to me, the minister calls.' He nods. 'We have powertoni'.

He repeated the word a few times before I realized what it meant. It was a contraction of 'power of attorney', the ability to act on someone's behalf, or to have others do your bidding, sign documents, release criminals, cure illnesses, get people killed. In Mumbai, the Shiv Sena is the one organization that has powertoni.

('Mumbai', Suketu Mehta, Granta 57)

MLA Pesarattu

Pesarattu is a variant of the dosa made with moong dal, what a pretentious restaurant menu would call 'a green gram and rice crepe topped with onion and chillies, served with ginger chutney'. It is an Andhra speciality, typical of the home cooking of the region.

During Chandrababu Naidu's time as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, the State Tourism Department cooked up a scheme to project the pesarattu as a symbol of Andhra's Best. First step was a website on this quintessential Andhra snack:

"We are making all efforts to add as many details as possible about the dish on the site, including 60 different ways of making the snack," says the Director, Tourism, G. Kishen Rao. After all, 'pesarattu' has a reputation built over generations and still lingers long on millions of taste buds. "Like gongura, pesarattu is as Telugu as it can get," he smiles.

The idea floated by the Chief Minister, N. Chandrababu Naidu, at one of the review meetings of the department set off Project Pesarattu with the Tourism officials scurrying out for the ideal recipe, master chefs in Andhra hinterlands and of course, webmasters who could host the website.

(K V S Madhav,'Pesarattu' steps out of your kitchen!', The Hindu, Feb 17, 2002)

Was pesarattu.com ever launched? Even if it did make it to cybersapace under another name, it's highly unlikely that the site survived the change in government: Chandrababu Naidu lost the Assembly elections this year, partly because voters thought he was wasting his time on constructing virtual Cyberabads when farmers were starving in his state.

It's tempting to link the MLA pesarattu to Naidu's folly, but it seems that the dish was invented before his time. The MLA stands for 'Member of the Legislative Assembly' of course, and the dish itself is a richer, VIP version of the humble pesarattu, stuffed with upma.

But why name it after a mere MLA, when every two-bit Mughlai restaurant in the country lists Chicken Shahjehan and Chicken Jahangiri on its tattered menu? The answer is that the MLA is all-powerful in Andhra Pradesh in ways we cannot imagine. Think of all those Telugu films with titles like Rowdy MLA and Independent MLA, and you'll understand that the term is a badge of status in the region. In fact, there may be an element of satire involved in naming a jumbo dosa an MLA dosa, a dig at the politican's voracious greed.

And how do you pass up a dish with the mysteriously tantalizing name of M.L.A. pesarat? This lentil pancake stuffed with an opulence of crisp-sweet, barely cooked onions, green chillies, fresh ginger and garlic is named for Members of the Legislative Assembly (because it's very rich -- get it?)(Greg Cox, 'Who needs meat?', restaurant review on Triangle.com, September 26, 2003)

As V.I.P's in India pesarattu is served as MLA Pesarattu (Member of Legislative Assembly) with upma folded in it and topped with a scoop of salted Amul butter. (post from prasad2 to EGullet Forum, September 23, 2004)

The MLA Pessarattu, which is the usual pesarattu served with upma. It sells like hot cakes in Tirupati and Vijayawada. (Alina Sen, 'Trailing the Andhra food route',The Times of India, September 12, 2002)

I think Vizag's most famous breakfast dish is the Pesarathu, a pancake-like dosa made out of green moong dal. It is cooked in every household and is also available on the menus of every tiffin restaurant in the city. It is popularly known as the MLA Pesarathu. Legend has it that MLAs of this city have always been fond of this dosa and demand it wherever they go... The Pesarathu, apart from the green moong dal, also has a little rice. The composition is, say, 95 per cent moong, which is soaked with the rice and made into a dosa paste. Into this dosa is stuffed not the spicy potato masala with onions, but a regular portion of upma!(Krishnan Nair,'Pesarathu, The Dosas MLAs Have For Breakfast!',Upper Crust)

Next week, children: the Spring Dosa.

Raisina Hill

Raisina Hill is the site in New Delhi where Rashtrapati Bhavan and the Secretariats are located. Some conscious symbolism was intended by the British architects who placed these structures on top of the hill, and Parliament at the base. Still, the address is frequently used as a synonym for the central government or the political establishment in New Delhi.

Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore live in a world very far from Kolkata and Kochi and they want to know what the arrival of the comrades on Raisina Hill means for them. (The Indian Express, May 17, 2004)

Kargil war's shadow continues to hover over the Raisina Hill. (The Pioneer, 18 June 2004)

Usage is by no means standard. As the following examples show, there are far too many seats of power in Delhi for one address to reign supreme. In the last citation, Raisina Hill is used in a narrower sense, for the President of India.

Nearly a decade of being 'nice' to the Americans as a policy is coming to its logical cul-de-sac in New Delhi’s Raisina Hill. That policy started with stray, isolated gestures during the days of P.V. Narasimha Rao’s prime ministership, when South Block was told by 7, Race Course Road, the prime ministerial home, that the United States of America was the most important foreign policy priority for India and that the Americans needed to be wooed. (K P Nayar, The Telegraph, November 13, 2002)

Since the 'Constitution Review' is premised on the Vajpayee Government's penchant for 'stability', the presidential remarks once again underline the divergence in thinking between Raisina Hill and Race Course Road. (The Hindu, January 26, 2001)

Hazaar fucked

There's been a spate of articles about Hinglish recently, thanks to David Crystal's claim that Hinglish, spoken by millions of Indians across the globe, is set to become more popular than English. The Business Standard (Oct 19, 2004) has a piece that cites some trends in support of the claim. Among other things, it notes that in the racing pages, "Silver Rainbow, Arctic Wind and Feng Shui now face the likes of Tashann, Ganga Mahaan and Jai Bharath".

Whatever. I think the author is on firmer ground when she claims that 'hazaar fucked', that classic expression from English, August is 'one of the phrases that, along with Yeh Dil Maange More and We Are Like That Only, ushered in the rise of Hinglish'. Certainly, Upamanyu Chatterjee was one of the first serious writers to comment on this mongrel tongue we all speak (Shobha De doesn't count):

"Amazing mix, the English we speak. Hazaar fucked. Urdu and American," Agastya laughed, "a thousand fucked, really fucked. I'm sure nowhere else could languages be mixed and spoken with such ease." The slurred sounds of the comfortable tiredness of intoxication, " 'You look hazaar fucked, Marmaduke dear.' 'Yes, Dorothea, I'm afraid I do feel hazaar fucked' - see, doesn't work".

(Upamanyu Chatterjee, English, August)

Konklish

There's a new book out on Konglish.

Mangalore , October 16: 'Ami Konglish Uloitanv' Volume II, a book by J B Sequeira was released by Rev Aloysius Paul D’Souza, Bishop of Mangalore in Shankerpura in Udupi District recently.

The book contains a mixture of Konkani and English sentences and phrases numbering more than 3,000 in daily usage.

What next? Tululish? Bhojlish? Khasilish?

Malayalish, Malglish, Minglish

What's a good name for a hybrid of Malayalam and English? Some people use Malglish, but that's too awkward a name for such a mallufluous tongue. Minglish is too confusing, it's used for hybrids of Marathi and Malay as well. Malayalish is better:

Character of the Year is Zeenat Aman, as the wildly improbable, Mallu-speaking Dr Babylona Menon, in Rajeev Nath’s Moksham. She’s descended from a Malayali grandfather and Spanish grandmother, and lives in Almaty, Kazakhstan, if you please. She asks someone in chaste Malayalish, "What is your belief about after death?"

(IFFI Diary by Meenakshi Shedde, Outlook, 18 Oct 2004)

But then again, is that too much Malayalam, too little English? If you're looking for a true half-and-half, the correct word would be Mallish. Though it does suggest a Kerala massage, an extra whiff of coconut oil you may or may not count as a bonus.

College Slang

The Times of India (Sunday, October 24) takes you on a guided tour of Campus Lingo 2004. Articles of this kind are quite standard in Indian newspapers by now, so there are rarely any new slang words to report. You know they're scraping the bottom of the barrel when some journo notes that kids these days seem to be using words like 'stuff' and 'dude' a lot.

Still, there are a few interesting trends to note. Mumbai street lingo is working its way into mainstream vocabulary faster than ever, thanks to movies like Munnabhai MBBS. And maybe it's a sign of the times that there are now a variety of words to describe the wannabe hep. The behenji-turned-mod (BTM) is passe, her place has been taken by call-centre executives with their Instant American accents. This is the age of the B2B - the Bindu-to-Britney.

Chamcha/Double-Tongued Word Wrester

Grant Barrett is a lexicographer for the Oxford University Press who tracks words as they enter and leave the English language. What makes his site, Double-Tongued Word Wrester, particularly interesting is the fact that he pays special attention to varieties of English from around the world. There's less than a handful of Indian words at the site, but the few you will find, like goonda tax or item girl are defined precisely and provided comprehensive citations, as befits a professional lexicographer. I found an interesting quote under chamcha:

1998 P.S. Sharma Times of India (Jan. 17) “In Praise of Chamchagiri”: No doubt, the British also had their sycophants—toadys, bachhas, jholichuks and hukkabardars—but chamchas of the modern vintage they had none. Chamchas are a breed apart. A chamcha, verily is more than a favourite. He is a catalytic agent to activate the Sahib’s ego and cloud and obfuscate his thinking.

I know about toady-bachchas and hukkabardars, but what on earth is a jholichuk? A quick Internet search suggests this is a derogatory term for Sikhs who collaborated with the Raj, but I haven't found a proper definition or explanation of the word's origin.

QSQT

Used to be short for Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak , the 1988 Amir Khan-starrer. A cutesy abbreviation replacing the original long-winded title: that made sense. But then came HAHK, which sounds like a paan-chewing lala clearing his throat (not spitting out the paan, for that we'll have to wait for the sequel HAHK-2), followed by DDLJ and RHTDM and the calculatedly cool K3G, and god knows what else. The trend seems to have vanished, these days Bollywood prefers terse Hindi titles with nonsensical English tags, as in Adaa: Will Kill U.

And so, the corporate world has moved in, putting QSQT to work after all these years. In its new rolled-up-sleeves avatar, the acronym stands for 'Quarter se Quarter tak'. For the Indian manager, that means a competitive scenario in which the pressure is on showing quarterly results, perhaps at the cost of long-term planning. The situation's fairly bleak if you're surviving QSQT, from quarter to quarter.

Although Nilekani admits that "our lives run quarter se quarter tak, qsqt" because of stockmarket pressures, Infosys has already chalked out a new blueprint to be the largest global software company.(Outlook, May 10, 2004)

After the economic reforms, the competition is far greater, and like the west, there is pressure for every quarter’s results. That’s why the investors are pushing us... The QSQT phenomena as they call it, quarter se, quarter tak. (Anu Aga & Shekhar Gupta on NDTV 24x7’s Walk-The-Talk, October 12, 2004)

The QSQT – quarter se quarter tak – result of opportunities reveals that the leash on recruitment facing India Inc is loosening and there are jobs aplenty up for grabs. ("Jobs claw back from the cold", The Telegraph, December 20, 2002)

Classifieds

Kitabkhana finds fractured phrases and Babu English in the classifieds.

"Survical body massage by male to male" competes with Tanisha, who will "service only elite family member", and others who will "hell both body and soul", should you be in need of helling by "beautiful m/f masseses".

("From the Utterly-Useless-Stuff Dept", Oct 12)

Two wheeler, four wheeler

Time Out Mumbai keeps an ear open for city slang. Here's a sample from the October 22 issue:

Two wheeler, four wheeler: Culinary euphemisms used by Gujaratis and members of other traditionally vegetarian communities when they succumb to the pleasures of the flesh and order up dishes made with the bipedal chicken or the quadrupedal goat.
Example: When we went to Bade Miyan yesterday, we couldn't decide whether (sic) to have between two wheeler or four wheeler, so we ordered both.

Make a move

File this under 'Those Inscrutable Americans'.

Savitha Nayak and Sunil Dholakia, who train employees of multinational corporations in soft skills such as dealing with conflict, negotiating and communicating, say they have added the basic dos and don'ts of interacting with the opposite sex to their curriculum.

"For example, we have many Indians who say, "Can I make a move?" when they mean they would like to take leave of someone. But if that is uttered in the US, to a lady, it could be taken for a sexual request," says Dholakia.

("Indian professionals wary of women", Washington Post, Oct 20)

Alur Dosh

Alur Dosh is a colourful Bengali phrase that translates as 'the fault of the testicles'. (The literal meaning of alu is potato, but it is also a slang term for the testicle). If you've been thinking with your dick, or you've done something stupid because you were driven crazy by lust, shrug it off by saying 'alur dosh'. Just blame it on your balls.

Or at least that's how a Bengali friend explained it to me. That's the meaning implied in this post to soc.culture.bengali , which refers to Priyanka Vadehra's Bengali stalker:

Although the action of the cops were very unjust, seems that the Mitra dude has a big "alur dosh"..

I've also come across the Bengali slang term aloobaaz, used for a flirt or a randy guy. Must derive from the same meaning of alu.

I'm sure there are other connotations to the phrase though. Looking for citations, I came across this forum where alur dosh is defined as a 'flaw in the character'.

I guess you could see it that way. Though I wonder, is this an oblique way of referring to impotence/homosexuality, implying it's all a matter of faulty equipment? Over at soc.culture.bangladesh, an American visitor's queries about how to join the local gay scene receive the blunt response, 'Go to Chittagong and use the word "Gandu" or say that you have "ALUR-DOSH", ok!!!'

Hinglish

David Crystal toh thinks ki Hinglish will take over the world only.