Here is a news item from today's Deccan Chronicle.

Enjoy

Bangalori Angrezi That Drives You Crazy

( and drove this writer literally out of town!)

Dr Rajeshwar Singh

I spent a year at Bangalore and gleaned a harvest of Bangalorean English words and their unusual usage. The piece below is my way of thanking the City for keeping me amused all along. I hope you find it amusing, too.

This is a mock-serious piece. It depends on the readers' sense of humor or their sensitivity to Bangalorean English to make out when I'm seriously serious or jokingly jocular.

Here we go…
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I'm new to Bangalore. I am somewhere in Jayanagar suburb, driving on a longish lane
(18th main, I discover later). I'm trying to find my way to Surana College. I have been directed by the college authorities to drive up to 'South end Circle', and ask for further directions.

Like any visitor new to a town, I get out of the car and ask for help from an alert, well-dressed person. These are the directions I receive from this well-meaning, well-informed person:

'Go straight… turn left at the firstttt circle …leave three circles, turn right at the fourth circle, and you will hit South end Circle'.

Obediently, I drive on and on, till the 18th main is no more; then thinking that I may have been going in the opposite direction, I take a 180-degree turn, and drive on 18th main again, till it ends at a petrol-filling station. Either way, I come across no circle. At the petrol station, I request a motorcycle-rider for help. By coincidence he too is heading towards Surana College, and asks me to follow him.

The missing-multiple-circles' mystery is resolved by the kindly principal of Surana College: he enlightens me that an intersection or a crossing is called a circle in this part of our planet.

Having driven around all the great circles of India - Mumbai's King's Circle, Horniman Circle, Jacob Circle; New Delhi's Connaught Circus, Gol Dakkhana - I try to seek some explanation for this uniquely Bangalorean geometrical perversion.

All that a few apologetic 'experts' have to say is this: 'Sir, the fact is that originally every crossing was planned to be a circle, but for reasons of space, the idea was dropped'. I smile: having been warned by behavioural psychologists that most half-truths usually begin with 'The fact is…'

But thanks to this early encounter with Bangalori Angrezi - that too in the firstttt week of my arrival - I become doubly alert hereafter to Bangalorean distortions and subversions of the English language, a language that I have learnt the hard way , not just in academia, but also during my 30 years' career as a medical writer. -

Indeed, repetitive assaults on my received knowledge of English finally take their toll: I decide to leave Bangalore, as these frequent un-English confrontations were becoming a threat to my livelihood.

Before leaving Bangalore, I did start a compilation, ' A Glossary of Bangalori Angrezi' for the benefit of fellow strangers who keep succumbing to the magnetic pull of Bangalore's job-market or its weather or both.


Here's a preview of my as yet incomplete Glossary:

Mains and Crosses

With rare exceptions, most mains are narrow lanes and most crosses are closer to the width of highways in a smaller town.

Don't Bunk a Pump

A petrol-filling station - Petrol Pump in the rest of country - is called Petrol Bunk.

Don't Pay-in; Deposit

Despite 'Pay-in Slip' clearly written, in Bangalore the term is 'deposit slip'

Dead-end

In other cities, when a street leads no further, it's a dead end: in Bangalore, the road merrily continues but its last turn is called a dead end.

Tinkering - the deepest dent in King's English.

After my car has received the usual welcoming kisses from Bangalore's chaotic drivers, I take it to an upmarket workshop to get the dents smoothened. And of course, I ask for an estimate. It reads:

a) Tinkering Rs. 9,000
b) Painting Rs. 3000

Seeing my horrified face, the workshop manager reassures me that he employs the best tinker in town, and that the charges for dent-beating are reasonable. I decide not to tell the manager that English dictionary defines 'Tinker' as an unskilled mender or a bungler, and 'to tinker' is to fiddle with an object with the possibility of damaging it.

Dr Rajeshwar Singh

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Pramod Chopra
Senior Mortgage Consultant
Mortgage Alliance Company of Canada