three words make a difference and faisalabad-ese

05Sep07

kipling had it wrong. keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you has got nothing to do with being a man. its about being able to pay your bills. imagine yourself in a situation where you’ve managed to generate a bill of rs 27,379 for your room service over a period of eight days – can i help it if i love good food? – and you have a lousy eleven grand in your wallet and no credit cards whatsoever. what do you say? what do you do? and by that i mean a solution which doesn’t involve either getting thrashed by a bunch of bellboys or running to bankruptcy court. will it make a difference if you’re a man or a woman? or even a noman? (i know this is off topic but when i was a kid in kuwait, the local tv channel dubbed sesame street in arabic and elmo was noman. if you find that funny, ernie and bert were anees and badar). like hell it will. at times like these you are forced to utter the most beautiful three word sequence in the english language, “bill to company”. btc.

pan fried chicken fillet rubbed in cracked black pepper with cream sauce, grilled onions and sauteed vegetables – rs. 850. fresh orange juice – rs. 120. cold coffee with chocolate ice cream – rs. 235. watching the huffy-puffy waiter drop the empty plates in the corridor on his way out – priceless. there are some things money can’t buy. everything else can be billed to company.

excuse me… what?

i just got sued by mastercard.
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there is a certain innocence in the way a denizen of faislabad is likely to spell a word precisely the way he pronounces it. there is after all, a very sane logic behind it. i mean when you spell words in urdu exactly the way you say them, why not apply the same rules to english? its not our mother tongue and in true paki style, other peoples’ mothers don’t count.

so if someone spells television as “televeeun” or blackcurrant as “blaccrunt”, why should we be surprised? so what if that doesn’t “maiyyur” – sorry, measure – up to international standards? of course this is a sweeping generalisation and there are obviously some people in good old lyallpur, manchester of the east, who do occasionally use the spellcheck on their word processors. like the following guy for instance.

but when you consider that this a menu card and not a brochure from our version of ikea you wonder.

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for your information, the gujjars were a mountain people in ancient times who used to depend entirely on their goats and things for a living. they were displaced by the mongols, specifically genghis khan and hulaqu khan and pushed downhill. today the gujjars account for a significant part of the population of punjab. the towns of gojra, gujranwala, gujrat and gujjar khan are all derived from the word gujjar. what is most interesting, however, is that if you use “gujjar” in the name for a movie, it is a guaranteed box office hit (graduate gujjar, buddha gujjar, eik gujjar sau badmaash, etc). which is why my pakistani adaptation of gone with the wind is going to be called gone with the gujjar. just thought you’d like to know.

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