Some of my favourites………………


The politics of interpreting History:
If you plunder from West to East, you are great like Alexander
If you do the same from East to West, you are a Barbarian like Genghis Khan!


According to Aerodynamic laws, the bumble bee cannot fly
Its body weight is not in the right proportion to its wing span
Ignoring these laws, the bee flies anyway


So you are married?
Congratulations! Don’t do it again!


A journalist had asked the Texan, U.S President George Bush jr, if he knew who the President of Chechnya was.
He replied – “ I don’t – do you?”!!





WHY MY MAID TALKS AND TALKS AND TALKS………

Well, I don’t actually have a maid, but you get the drift…. I’ve always been intrigued and often annoyed by the fact that maids and their male counterparts talk and talk. This dangerous Chinese whisper habit which often assumes malignant proportions makes one appear prejudiced for or against a number of issues that could have been harmlessly set off by an innocuous comment or better still, a habit you practice or even better, your very life style.

Sample this – before I knew what hit me, I was branded a Brahmin hater, simply because I told an old maid that I eat chicken often. It may seem perplexing to those of us who are not in the loop of things, but veteran house-wives and other such dragon ladies simply smirk at my discomfiture – “juvenile novice”! Surprisingly enough, they don’t seem to be having the same problems. An agile combination of bribe and tough love seems to do the trick for them. For those of us who are yet to get our degrees in this new management program, we continue to be looked at askance by a virulently malicious social system which has clubbed me an ignominious pariah.

What then makes these illiterate ladies pathological ‘talkers’?? I realized that my poor sisters live an insecure life compounded by the fact that they have no access to legitimate information. This is even more pertinent when they have to walk into a number of absolute stranger’s houses to do intimate family work – cleaning personal effects, running the heart of the house – the kitchen (sink), and even procuring vegetables.

How do they know who will do a Shiney Ahuja on them? How do they know whether I will pay them or not? How do they know if I will work them to the bone or not? How do they know if I will beat them or not?? If they were you and me, they would use a combination of commonsense honed by years and years of education and the confidence that what the law promised them and all other Indian citizens will hold them in good stead. We just know that 2 and 2 will be 4.

Cut to the maid. She can’t read – so no matter what the papers say about Shiney Ahuja, she will only know about it when her friends tell her about it. So if she doesn’t gossip, she will never hear about it. Thus talking and gossiping are her lifelines to survival. Since she has no idea what the Indian law has in store for her and lacks a lot of commonsense, she depends on the ‘intelligence’ provided by her neighbours, family and friends. This, they get through the all vital ‘talk’ and ‘gossip’. Thus, a maid who doesn’t talk or gossip is not a maid! The only problem of course is in the quality of this ‘information’. Along with the important news that could save her from a Shiney Ahuja, she also gathers a lot of Chinese whisper style improbable news which she would automatically reject had she been literate. But she isn’t.

We all know that maids and their ilk are the lowest social group of people. But I have seen that people who are from lower class backgrounds also tend to talk a lot. Why does this happen then? Clerks, babus and others talk a lot too. Why? Though there exists a definite distinction from the maids who gossip, this class of chatterati are not much different. Their reasons though are very different. They talk a lot because, though literate, they have low social standing. Their words and actions carry no weight. The only way they can gain attention is by talking. So they talk. Besides, since they are nobodies, so to speak, or rather unknowns, they have nothing to lose. It’s not as if folks would say the son of so and so is saying so and so. It’s simply a case of ‘a’ someone said a something. The sense of worth inherent to a person from a certain social standing is missing. The sense of I, son of so and so, from the family of so and so can’t do it, or the “we are not like that” simply doesn’t exist for them. It is not below their dignity to talk. The stiff upper lip can’t prevail when the upper lip is so wobbly! The decades of upbringing that naturally ingrains a sense of self worth is conspicuous by its absence.

This then, is the linguistic thread that runs through us; that says so much about who you are and more importantly, who you’re not.



13/9/10