Indian Father Enslaves Family

What is another word for 'fanatic tyrant'? Arvind Kumar could tell you. And so could his wife, his daughter, and his only son, all of whose lives were sacrificed at the altar of Arvind's insane dream to create the largest Hindi thesaurus the world has ever seen.

Arvind first felt this terrible desire the write a thesaurus as a young man in 1952. He came across a copy of the chillingly titled: Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.” This book later went on to infamy as the Roget’s Thesaurus. He was seduced by its gilded pages and handcrafted layout that cooly systematized the world. The impulse to impose a similar order on the country and people of India overwhelmed him.

Then the moment passed. He forgot this madness and for more than twenty years lived a life no different from his  upper-class, well-educated peers. He found work as a magazine editor, married his wife Kusum. They had a son and then a daughter who they loved. Then one night at a cocktail party Arvind looked around him and felt a dark shadow come over him. Wasn't there more that he could be doing with his life? Wasn't there some great plan he was betraying? Suddenly he remembered that twisted Frenchman's book.

He did not sleep that night as the demon's raged within him. By the morning the battle was lost and his mind was completely turned to the thought of the monstrous thesaurus. He told his wife what he had planned for them and began hoarding dictionaries and money in preparation for the task. Two years later he quit his job and retreated from society. Work on the thesaurus began.

Each entry was written onto a piece of cardboard and filed by hand. It was incredibly slow and painstaking labour that drain body and soul of life. If Arvind had been able to admit his madness for what it was and at least not force anyone else to share in it perhaps we could look more kindly on him now. But instead he pulled first his wife, then his son and his daughter into his penniless scheme.

Kusum, already a mother of grown children, was forced to tackle ALL THE NOUN entries while Arvind reserved the more esoteric and conceptual ones for himself to mull over. For twelve long years Kusum slaved at Arvind's linguistic mill. By 1990 there were 60,000 cards with about 250,000 handwritten words filling 70 trays. By the next year, they had listed 350,000 Hindi words.When boasting to others about the scale of his work, Arvind tells of how the book contains 125 words for turmeric, and 32 for helmet. It is worth noting that both of these are NOUNS.

Next to fall foul of this terrible regime was Arvind's only son. “We knew it was time to shift to a more organised form of filing, and to start using a computer.” says Arvind. And so his son Sumeet, who was living a happy life as a doctor in India, found himself emigrating to Iran in order to save enough money to buy his father a computer. Once he had done that, he had to return to the family home in order to type all the entries up. It was at this point his sister was asked to lend a hand.

After another five year's slave labour by the whole family the job was at last finished and the book was ready to publish. The largest and most comprehensive Hindi thesaurus ever written...it barely caused a stir.

Arvind decided to add an English side to the book.

Arvind and his unlucky family toil on to this day. In a country of a billion, they are alone on a road which has no end, and only a lunatic's urges to guide them.

When boasting about the originality of his work Arvind points out how difficult it is to translate a western invention like the 'Spinning Jenny':

"A literal translation into Hindi would be ridiculous because the name was coined by the inventor and is specific to the language. But, if you go to the Bombay mills and ask the workers, they have their own name for the machine: Putli.”

 The Spinning Jenny was a machine that swallowed up the lives of countless women and children in Europe. Instead of taking yourself off for a walk to the mills Arvind, to gawp at the poor workers there, I think you could find a fitting translation in your own backyard: the English-Hindi/Hindi-English Thesaurus and Dictionary.

Listening to the stars

This is completely unrelated to the theme of this blog but I thought I'd put it up anyway as a human interest piece. It's about Wanda Diaz, an astrophysicist working at the University of Glasgow.
(I'm not sure if this will work on all browsers....)

The match that shamed Scrabble!

The world governing body has tried to suppress its release. Here, in the public interest, is the official commentary of the final of the 2012 British All-comers Scrabble Tournament.
(I'm not sure if this will work on macs....)

Going cold turkey

For a fortnight we were on top of the world, a nation raised to the level of the gods as the Olympians came to our shores. This morning we came crashing back down to earth. We've gone cold turkey. We need just a little more Olympics, this is all too sudden. Couldn't they just have had a couple of events on today....just one or two...Maybe a bronze medal fight in the Taekwondo, or a replay of the women's shot put since the winner was doping.

But let's face it, we're all guilty of doping. We've taken a massive hit of class-A sport and now we're paying the price. It's all I can do to admit that life must go on and today's blog is only therapeutic. I'm just going to look up the etymology of the first words that pop into my head....

Repechage: a heat of a competition (preferably Olympic) in which contestants have another chance to qualify for the next round. It comes from the French repêchage, literally 'fishing out again'.

Keirin: A Japanese word that means racing/competing wheels. As in, 'No use keirin over spilt Olympics.'

Ippon: literally meaning 'one full point' in Japanese, this is the highest score that can be gained from a single move in Judo. A waza-ari, worth half an ippon, translates as half a full point. 'I waza happy man, once ippon a world-record time.'

Dressage: From the French for to prepare. This word will hopefully be obsolete by 2016 with jousting taking its place in the national discourse.

Mo-bot: Forged in a mo-ment of pure ecstasy, this ridiculous neologism might be all that's left of the games very soon. I intend to do this at all moments of intense pleasure from now on. Other words are lining up to get the Mo treatment: Mo-torious, Mo-nation, hedge-Mo, Mo-mance falling in love with Mo Farah, and the "place-Mo effect", when you watch someone you have been told is Mo Farah win a race and feel immediate euphoria.

Cold turkey: this, originally American, piece of slang comes from cold turkey being a meal that takes no time to prepare. After binging on Olympic-flame-grilled sport-steaks for a fortnight, it is hard to swallow cold turkey the next day.

Bolt, Blake, Weir: three lions roar in London

What an amazing race, the whole thing. From the moment Usain Bolt started chatting to the girl looking after his lane to Weir's singing the praises of Birmingham at the end. If there's one thing I'm going to take away from this race, it's that I should give Birmingham more time.

I'm not an athlete, nor a huge fan of athletics so I can't comment on how well they ran. Instead, here's a few pieces of Jamaican patois for you to whisper in your children's ears and hope that it will turn them into the winning machines we watched tonight.

Before the race Bolt was "tannin so back"/"so laid back". You could see Blake telling Weir, "mek we dweet"/"Let's do it."Then the starter shouted "Tan steddy"/"Stand still". There was a pause, and then they were off.

As they ran the corner Bolt was heard to say, "I dey 'pon haste, unnu can come wid mi"/"I'm in a hurry, you can come with me." He might have been thinking when he came down the final stretch that, "Mi back a hat mi". "My back hurts" and as he crossed the line that Blake was a bit "too red eye" "envious". Weir on the other hand was clearly delighted, thinking only "did deh deh" "I was there".

Bolt is, when all's said and done, "bare dog down inna that yard". "The only dog in the yard."

Bolt will have bought off the bar and the three lions are sure to bleach hard through the night.

Martian phrasebook not a hit with Rousseau

If eighteenth century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had seen Curiosity's images of the red planet he would not have been rushing to sign up for evening classes in Martian. JJ believed that language sprang from man's interaction with his environment and that the landscape and climate of that environment impacted on and shaped the language. The conclusion of his argument was that language arose in the Mediterranean and was a beautiful, lilting affair that mirrored its halcyon surroundings. As it traveled North it was stripped of its romance and became a harsh, loveless thing.

Rousseau was a French wanker and probably just came up with this theory to add fuel to his hatred of the northern races who, he felt, had been made barbaric by their climes. It's thanks to Rousseau's insight though that NASA have been able to equip their Mars rover with a basic phrasebook. So suck on those frogs' legs Rousseau and go play pattonk with your garlicky ballbag.

By studying previous photograph's of the Martian landscape NASA have been able to guess at the grammatical structure and some simple items of vocabulary that would arise from it. To say 'Hello' in Martian you need to make a sound like a slow-motion vomit. Asking 'take me to your leader' sounds like a maggot's drawn out fart. Verbs are placed at the end of the sentence following the one to which they apply. Weirdly, the writing system that NASA's linguistic supercomputer has predicted looks a lot like a string of emoticons and hashtags. This point has led to fears that the Martians may already be brainwashing our children by teaching them their language.

So far Curiosity has only used its phrasebook once to ask for directions to the nearest village. It turned out it had been speaking to a rock, a fact only discovered after it had already followed the inert rock's directions and turned left at the missile factory when it should have gone right.

Indian English-wise

While in America recently, around evening on the Pacific coast, someone said to me and my friends, 'Go speak to Brad, he'll hook you up, he'll take you out, you'll catch some waves. Sweet.' I completely understood what they were saying and knew that never in my life would I have been able to come up with that sentence myself.

Having a shared language but such different cultures is like giving two kids exactly the same box of Lego and telling them each to build a house. The sensible one will build one with doors and windows, the maverick will go for a house with no doors that only magic people can enter, or something with more gun turrets than houses traditionally need. The point is they'll use the same building blocks, language, to construct the same thing, a meaningful sentence, but because of their differing characteristics they'll do it in a different way. Everyone knows this already. I just wanted to talk about Lego.

India has the same Lego set as us and the United States. It too is an English speaking nation. But if India were involved in this hypothetical house building test then its finished product would look a lot like what would happen if the Deathstar contract had gone to cowboy builders. Indian English is, to a Brit, mad. It is far, far madder than anything we have. It is incredibly hyperbolic, energetic and it is, most probably, the future of our language. So we better learn a bit. The good news here is that it's a marked improvement on our way of doing things.

The first and biggest blessing is that spelling, within certain circles, is looked down on. In others it is the first thing out the window in the rush to communicate. I've never been a fan of spelling so I like the sound of this.

Then there is the wonderful vocabulary and idioms of Indian English. Most famous is 'prepone': to bring something forward in time. That makes sense, if you can postpone an meeting you can also prepone it. There's the bizarre and ubiquitous use of the suffix -wise. It can go on the end of anything; sellotape-wise, to do with sellotape, school-wise, museum-wise, truth-wise, breast-wise. Whatever you fancy goes. My favourite of the idioms I've come across is 'out of station', equivalent to 'out of office'. That goes back to the time of the Raj, apparently, when the British rulers would go out of station when they toured the area.

By far the best thing about Indian English though is the indefinable, its style. Here's an example of what I mean. It's taken from the company history of one of India's leading education company's and the paragraph is talking about the impact of their interactive lessons and course material.

 The result was amazing. Knowledge flourished freed from the centuries old bonds of books and chalk and blackboard. A new light of understanding dawned on young awakened minds. And the classroom became a fascinating place to be in... And the teacher smiled as she now saw not just one, two or three but a sea of hands go up every time she asked a question.

I don't believe any Brit, born with a heightened sensitivity to looking a fool as we are, could ever have banged that out.