The Turkish desi..

San was recommended a Turkish watch by one of her friends and she started watching it.  She had just started and I walked past the family room and said "are you watching something in Turkish?" .. she was surprised that I could recognize it was Turkish by just walking past to the kitchen..

It was a cute chick flick called "Her Yerde Sen". After spending 2 hours watching it, I thought it would come to a happy ending and it kind of went to titles abruptly..

Then she sheepishly tells me it is a "serial" and that was the first episode.. There are 22 such episodes 2 hours long. I get migraines if I watch TV for more than 3-4 hours in a row but this was cute and we hardly watch anything together.. 

So I beg her to watch one episode with me every night.. we were okay for two days.. then the long weekend hit and she just went to episode 18 in two days while I was still at 4! She binge watched the damn thing by fast forwarding 2 hour episodes to under an hour. . . she insisted I do the same.. and I gave her a long lecture on why fast forwarding rom coms to a kiss is as bad as fast forwarding Jackie Chan as he makes all the prep moves before he strikes.. you know the action is going to be amazing, but watching him setup the strike is as important as the 15 seconds of action itself.. the whole buildup of the drama is lost if you fast forward.. 

I am going to watch 1 hour a day and maybe finish this in another 16 days without fast forwarding.. so yes, I am spending the long weekend watching a Turkish serial! 

Then came the part where I surprised my wife with some Turkish vocab.. even the kids were surprised.. everytime I show any proficiency in a language the folks at home automatically assume it has to do with a girl.. 

So here is the back story.. One of my close grad school friends Sedat was from Turkey and we used to live in different floors of the same Apartment complex. It was me, a Bengali guy and my Turkish friend taking turns making Tea (Tea bag tea, Turkish tea, Varanasi Chai) in someones apartment every day and we would watch Star Trek and Simpsons back to back for an hour on week days. A lot of great memories.. 

we would also teach each other phrases on what things were called in Tamil, Bengali and Turkish. Sedat thought it would be a good idea to teach me enough Turkish to pass me off as Turkish in one of his get togethers in his apartment. It was an experiement or prank of sorts. He used to give me cheat sheets to practice and I found some of them to show my wife and kids! (in the process I also found a lot of old photos etc. which was a trip down memory lane). 

there were many such sheets..can't find the rest of them. He taught me conversational Turkish and all I had to do was pronounce every word correctly.. think I did him proud by passing off as a Turkish dude.. He always thought I was a good student. Had no idea of the detailed words but could repeat entire sentences from memory.. 

The good thing is that I can always come up with intersting stories that surprise my kids.. 

Yeah kids.. your dad was cool once! 

Language barrier

Last weekend my twitter feed was going non stop, and most of those tweets were #chennaiexpress, the new Shahrukh Khan movie. 

Most of these tweets were taking offense to how south Indians were stereotyped in this movie and how the Tamil spoken by the heroine and hero were offensive because no one who speaks Tamil actually talks like that.

Think Apu of Simpsons. Indian's don't speak like that. Apu stood for all Indians which was a higher level of sterotyping. My grad student friends would say hello to me in the Apu accent! Initially it was annoying, but then again, I leant do come back with some pretty good comments on my own.

The world hasnt moved much in 20 years of my staying in the US. Twenty years ago someone asked me "so you speak Indian?" and as late as three months ago, someone asked me the same question. One would assume that in a place where 1 in 5 people is Indian and Samosa and Tea are as staple as Pizza and Soda at any birthday party, folks would know that there is no language called "Indian"... but one assumes wrong!

Was very busy with work and that meant waiting to watch Chennai Express. Finally got to see it and thoroughly enjoyed it.  There are some prerequisites to enjoying this movie. 

1. You should be an SRK fan. 

2. You should have watched all his previous films (or some of the jokes are lost on you). I was laughing out so loud when he says "I have done this earlier too" while pulling the heroine into a moving train..

3. You should not be easily offended by stereotype jokes. Watching a lot of Russell Peters, Maz Jobrani, Ahmed Ahmed etc. helps. 

4. You should get the jokes!

All that said, I had no issues with SRK who was his usual self which is what I go to watch in an SRK movie. A goofy ham of a performance. The movie was abmling along nicely till they decided on a 10 minute fight scene at the end. Why? 

In the hands of a better director, this storyline would have made a better movie.. and maybe he/she would have dubbed the heoines Tamil dialogues and it would have been a bigger hit with South Indian folks as well!

Just when I was telling San that the movie was fun, the little one says "I have an episode of our favorite serial called The Littlest Pet Shop and you are going to love it!"

So they play me this on Netflix online and it was a laugh riot. SRK being spoofed on a kid's serial!

Hopefully you clicked on all those links and immunized yourself from getting angry at language sterotypes and then watch Chennai Express.

You might enjoy it!

Name-onic..

If you have a name that is not so common in the country you live in and anything more than a Jack or John is given up as "too complicated", you tend to start giving folks a mnemonic just so they can get your name right.. at least the spelling part!

This moring there was a yoga teacher who taught class. Apparently she has been teaching at BYSJ for a few months but this was my second time attending her class. Asked her for her name after class and she said "what is your name?"

So I gave her the mnemonic "It is Sundar. Sunday with an R" and she smiled. The real issue is that most of the folks who are told "Sunday with an R",  forget the R part and call me Sunday which is worse!  

Flashback to the early nineties..

Having spent precious rupees just spelling out SUNDARARAMAN NARAYANAN to various university admins to find out that they cannot find my file or GRE or TOEFL scores and going over the name over and over again, a strategy was deviced.

Had gotten tired of making AT&T richer and my parents poorer by the day..

Thanks to one of those admins who recomemnded she asked me to spell my name on the ISD call with a word for each letter. She had asked me "N as in Nancy or M as in Mary?" and I went "Voila! that is it. I can now spell my name to these folks who are unfamiliar with long names and get it right the first time!"

Still remember talking to Judy Trachtman who was our Admin head at Drexel shortly before I came to the USA for the first time to check on something about my I-20.. She goes "Spell your name for me kid!" and I go "Sugar Uncle Navy Dates Alpha Rainbow..." and she just started laughing and said "Oh my. You are special. What a colorful picture we paint!" Will always cherish conversations with Judy.. again, I am digressing.. 

Coming back to the name.. Sundararaman was too complicated for anyone. So came down to Sundar and my thesis advisor asked me "Can I just call you Sun?" and my jaw dropped. Not because of the additional 50% discount that was being asked of my name that had already been cut in half... but because there was a Chinese dude by the same name in the department roster! 

That is when I came up with "My name is Sundar. Sunday with a Rainbow at the end!" 

The ones that do get it right based on that mnemonic say it "Sondaar" which is as close to it as they will ever get. The short sound for the u and the a?

Have given up on it, a long time ago!

You should hear Jr. and the little one introduce me to non-desis.. they introduce me as "my dad soondaar!" 

I laugh on the outside...

Appa, she is kusu vutting!

Now that translates word for word from Tamlish to:

Daddy, she is farting!

When you have a household that speaks a mixed tongue, where words that are neither here nor there make up more than 30% of the vocabulary, life gets to be interesting.

The English speaking folks can only understand part of the conversation. The grand parents and relatives in India look puzzled in the video chats over the weekend because they are not sure if they heard things right. The only people who understand the kids and the parents in conversations are other kids raised in America or parents raising their kids in America who have the exact same mother tongue.

Yes. A tamlish kid speaks a different dialect than a Kannadlish or Telugish kid.

Much like a North Indian will perceive all south Indian languages to be similar sounding and lump them all as one, a Hindlish parent or kid might lump all these dialects as one.

That said, it is really funny when the parents also start talking like the kids!

Why we do it is beyond me. Maybe we think it will be easier to get through to them? We think it is cute? It makes sense being Tamil speaking people in America and somehow optimizes the total number of words that have to be spoken to convey the meaning in both languages simultaneously?!

We speak sentences like

"Appa, can you come pal thEch me?" = Daddy, can you come teeth brush me?

"Appa, the meen is kutty pOtting!" = Daddy, the fish is baby dropping!

etc.

Nakking (licking), kudiching (drinking), thodaching (wiping dry), etc. are one set of variants where the verb starts of in Tamil but ends up as some kind of gerund with the "ing" ending.

Then there are the variations like "doneaa?" which gets a response "donnu!" where the english word gets the Tamil ending added to it to convey question vs. answer, active or passive voice, or tense!

doneaa = are you done ?
Donnu = yes I am!

This is how a tamizh concept gets ported over to Tamlish

There is one more variant.

"Daddy, can you kadichy saap my tummy?" which kind of translates to :
"Daddy, can you bite eat my tummy?" which is their way of saying
"Daddy, can you blow raspberries on my tummy?"

Note that Kadichy is close to Kadichu (or bitten), but saap is shortened for Saaptu (eaten). Now when two action words are chained back to back, the second one gets chopped. An English concept now gets carried over to Tamlish!

Sometimes, we are misunderstood, but mostly we get the best of both worlds!

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Translating in your head

The kids have caught on to "vaadaa maaplai" a song from the movie Villu (which was played repeatedly on Vijay TV as part of singing, dancing competitions). They have also watched this song a gazillion times now on youtube and amused themselves with Vadivelu saying "bad girl" in his Tamlish accent.

Jr. even sings the song out loud and they both jump up and down in an attempt to dance to her singing (they have eluded the secret video so far. They stop dancing when they see me have the iPhone in the horizontal position.

So I just gave up and sat down to watch them sing and dance.

There is a line in that song which says "ratham varaadhu" which translates to "you won't bleed" or "no blood will come"..

Jr. actually sang "bloodtham varaadhu"!

I laughed and asked her why she sang that and she said "I know what the tamil words mean, but I go from the meaning in english to remember the Tamil song!"

It was amazing to see a six year old clearly understand what was going on in her head. What is really interesting here is that when it comes to English or Spanish songs, I would internally guide myself with Tamil for english songs and english for spanish songs.

Looks like speaking Tamlish in the house is not enough. It is very obvious that the primary language in our kid's head is English. Not that we expected anything different, but we know that Jr. thinks in english and then answers in Tamil.

Hopefully, a secret video will follow....

ps. the whole song is full of double meaning and the kids don't have a clue what they are singing.. while it is amusing to watch, it is also sad to see how a TV in the middle of your living room can influence your kids and how it is just not in your control .. then again, I have a reputation as a control freak dad already!

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