Delhi (26 page)

e.g. ‘Please revert the letter for updation of information, and we'll prepone the meeting then and there itself while you deboard the train, isn't it.'

Probably best to schedule your meeting in English, too. As Rushdie pointed out, ‘No people whose word for “yesterday” is the same as their word for “tomorrow” can be said to have a firm grip on the time.'

(2) Swear like a trooper. (Options 1 and 2 are mutually exclusive, unless you're a Bombay gangster.) Like everywhere else, many insults involve incest, genitalia and/or your mother.

e.g. No, I'm not going to provide you with a list. Shame on you.

As well as a whole store of the aforementioned English naughtiness, there is the intrinsic
filmi
coolness of the Mumbaikars' dialect, which is so awesome that the word for ‘awesome' sounds just like ‘jackass'.

e.g
. ‘So that hot online lady turned out to be a 40-year-old man…that's first-class KLPD, yaar.' (This slightly crude abbreviation is unfortunately shared by the Netherlands national police agency. Let's say it refers to a snafu: the polite American English translation might be ‘My expectations were raised only to be cruelly thwarted, leaving me ruefully shaking my head.' The less polite one involves a stick and a male appendage.)

Indians also mysteriously hate spoons: a spoon,
chamcha
, is a toady, a sycophantic minion. To which you might reply
‘Bhains ki aankh?
buffalo's eye?'—which means, aptly, ‘WTF?'

Are you in trouble?
In this case, use Hindi. It's full of little blame-dodging techniques. Strong and unruly feelings like regret, love, hunger, and diarrhoea often happen
to
you in Hindi (
mujhe dast hai
, etc). We humans are mere ants facing a powerful and hostile world/our passions/loose bowels. And rather than admit a lack of knowledge, perhaps you just don't remember: ‘It's not that I don't know where the hotel is, madam,' the auto driver always says. ‘Of course I
know
, hahaha, the memory just isn't coming to me—
mujhe yaad nahin.'

Consider supplementing your Hindi evasions with the little English word ‘sorry'. Not only is there no Hindi equivalent: as Rupert Snell says, sorry is ‘unmatched as a social disclaimer—a perfect blend of concision and insincerity'.

Are you reporting on India?
India is special, with advantages and problems utterly unlike those in the rest of the world. This must be linguistically stressed in the Anglophone media whenever possible.

Indian politics are particularly exceptional, with all its melodrama (
tamashas
and
filmi-
style dramabaazi). Newspapers overflow with the country's own special varieties of strikes and protests
(bandhs, hartals, gheraos, dharnas)
, useless bureaucrats (
babus
), and dodgy demagoguery (tax sops for
aam admi
, ‘the common man').

The crime world overlaps heavily with politics in India, where a huge number of MPs have criminal records and are surrounded by gangsterish minions,
goondas
and other
badmashes
(English also gets its word ‘thug' from India, after the murderous robber cult of Thuggee, suppressed in the 1830s). Unsurprisingly crime too enjoys special Hinglish vocabulary. Theft is far more innovative than the poor old Brits could manage, as we see from the news story ‘Frequent dacoities and looting of fish from bheris in the Sonarpur area; Sleuths nab their man'. English is also inadequately visceral for paying a bribe
(hafta)
or taking out a contract on a hated enemy
(supari)
. The scale of all this crime and politicking is such that Hinglish requires its own numbering system. English hundreds and thousands are mere trifles: instead Indian journalism requires the
lakh
(100,000) and the
crore
(10,000,000).

Much of this is euphemistic. There is no sexual harassment in India, only ‘Eve-teasing'. New university students aren't savagely tortured by their contemporaries, but given a traditional welcome ‘ragging'. Police violence is usually confined to the charmingly rustic ‘lathi charge', which sounds like a variant of the Harlem Shake; a
lathi
is actually a five-foot-long metal-tipped stick hungover from the colonial police. And I can confirm that against all appearances there are no blackouts or electricity theft in India, but mere ‘loadshedding' and ‘heavy AT&C losses'.

At other times Hinglish can reveal the brutal truth. There is a problem I never realized I had before I arrived—one so terrible that advertising girls have tears in their eyes and transnational corporations are forced to step into the breach. I am talking, of course, about ‘Hair Fall'. Previously I'd laboured under the misapprehension that the human head naturally shed 150+ hairs a day, but now I understand that I am in fact part of a feral, balding underclass.

As the above suggests, the traffic is far from one-way. English is the greatest magpie language of them all. It's ‘about as pure as a cribhouse whore,' said the sci-fi guru James Nicoll. ‘We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.' Tangy words it has shamelessly nicked from the subcontinent include shampoo, jungle, cheetah, dungarees, bandana, verandah, bungalow, juggernaut, cummerbund, mongoose, catamaran, yoga, pundit, polo, avatar, chit, loot, dinghy, doolally, coolie, pariah, cot, typhoon, atoll and nirvana. Even Britain's nickname ‘Blighty' is bastardised via the Indian army from the Urdu
vilayati
(foreign). Remember that next time you pukka nationalists don your cushy khaki swastika-covered cashmere pyjamas.

Unsurprisingly several of these words are food-related—curry, chutney, toddy, punch. The wine critic and fundamentalist New Yorker Bill Marsano has said, ‘The British Empire was created as a by-product of generations of desperate Englishmen roaming the world in search of a decent meal.' This colonization of British English is continuing via the curryhouse (albeit usually run by Pakistanis and Bangladeshis). Into the mouths of Britishers the Hindi is discreetly slipped: naan, daal, biryani, aloo gobi, chana masala, lamb ‘[with] two onions' (dopiaza), chicken ‘roasted' (bhuna) or ‘bucket' (balti)… The average curry-munching football fan probably understands more Hindi than his elite English equivalent.

The allure of both Hindi and English is down to this promiscuity. They are able to accommodate, more or less, the requirements of the non-fluent. Linguists call them ‘bridge' or ‘vehicular' languages, which enable non-native speakers to communicate with speakers of a third language. Hindi is probably the world's third most widely understood language, while perhaps two billion people around the world have some degree of competence in English. Throw in Hindi's twin, Urdu, and you can make yourself at least vaguely understood by almost half the world's population—maybe not to perform a sonnet or ghazal, but to order a beer.

India's languages are perhaps especially open to outside influence. There is no real tradition of translation. Instead, everyone simply grows up speaking three, four or five tongues. It's extremely impressive. It's also Hindi and Hinglish's great asset and weakness.

There is a school in every country that disapproves of their language's magpie tendencies. Hindi has been perhaps too keen to kick out its own vocabulary in favour of Englishisms, diminishing the world's store of charming words. Grumpy old Indians sigh that the Youth of Today have forgotten their heritage and can only talk in informal txtspk, expletives, and a bastardized foreign half-language. Grumpy old Britishers sigh that the Youth of Today can only talk in informal txtspk, expletives, and Americanisms.

Part of me eye-rolls at these snooty oldsters, of course. Languages always have and always will expand and evolve, and it's not as if in the pre-English era all Indians walked around reciting Ghalib and musing on Sanskrit's finer poetic nuances. But there is a very real difference between the two tongues. English is the indisputable lingua franca of today's world. It connotes modernity, business savvy and class—spread, of course, by the superpower America and before it the British Empire. Hindi lacks this prestige.

Hinglish is not yet a real solution. English has many dialects. All can facilitate social interactions, all can be creative, all are valuable. Not are all equally respected. The fact is that English, like globalization, is far from democratic. All too often Hinglish appears in literature only to be mocked:
Are you writing a novel?
You are having much of luck. Yenithing and yevrything in Hinglish sounds first-class hilarious only! Quickly, fut-a-fut, throw in a few descriptions of bubbling chutney, stir in family life, and watch the awards roll in for your zabardast prose. Wah, wah! It doesn't (yet) bring enough authority and credibility to the table. Not all dialects are created equal.

Now I've lured you through the chapter, I'll be honest. There's no need for you to learn Hindi, or any other Indian language. Yes: it's time for the obligatory section on India's most famous and beloved gesture. Throw out the phrase books, the capricious software, the overpriced and suspiciously non-native tutor. You don't need 'em. All you need to do, citizen of the world, is to master one simple yet profound gesture: the Indian head bobble.

The bobble's effect is something between a nod, a shrug, a dog's tail wag, and flipping the bird at someone when their back's turned. Observation suggest that it means:

‘Yo, homies'

‘Yes'

‘No'

‘Thanks'

‘I understand'

‘I don't understand'

‘I acknowledge your existence, underling'

‘I shall give the impression of doing your bidding, madam, but I would like to register my extreme lack of enthusiasm. In fact, I'm not even sure your request is possible, but I'm damned if I'll tell
you
that.'

‘Meh, whatever'—or more precisely, the sense of profound existentialist ennui contained in the French word
‘Bof'
.

There are many variations: dangerously rapid wobble = probably a good thing; slow waggle accompanied by closed eyes = ominous. Just to make it more interesting, many people—the same people who otherwise deploy faces of extreme joy or hysterical sorrow to accompany everything from Bollywood dance moves to haggling—deliberately keep their faces entirely impassive while wobbling to avoid giving away any clues. Because clues just complicate communication.

This ocean of meaning gives rise to some minor ambiguities in social interactions. My favourite dubious history of the head bobble was put forward by an Indian management consultant:

For well over 400 years, Indians were ruled by the British Empire and before that it was all monarchy. And people were afraid of saying no as an answer…

Is it a yes or a no? You decide. One TEDtalker has called the head bobble the archetype of Indian recognition of ‘the power of subjective truth in decisionmaking'. That is to say, Indians, as my (Indian) friend generalised wildly, hate to say no. Is the hat shop that way? Yes, madamji, if you want it to be that way. Do you still have train tickets left? All truth is relative, madamji, and we are but motes of dust in the timeless eye of the Universe. Not for nothing does the waggling movement resemble ∞, the eternal loop of infinity.

What I'm trying to say is that the head bobble is a cunning and sublimely useful manoeuvre: imagine its potency when deployed against an unfairly nosy supervisor or when caught indulging in some light bigamy. I am frankly amazed that (British) English hasn't already stolen and trademarked it. Americans might think straight talkin' is a virtue, but every Britisher knows that this is a misconception characteristic of a nation with too much roadkill and not enough doilies. A Chicago-born friend was recently horrified to discover that ‘very interesting' in British English actually means ‘perfectly blithering, you gormless old berk'. The head bobble shows equal sensitivity to the relationship between hierarchy and honesty.