An adventure to remember

Parents of a friend were visiting him from his hometown in Bihar during our BTech days. Initially he planned to take them to Priya cinema for a movie and dinner in a restaurant close by. However he dropped this idea after thinking over this a little. "I am afraid they will get a cultural shock.", he quipped explaining the change of plans. Today he lives in Delhi with his two kids, both of whom are born Delhites. If he takes them to Kolkata sometime, I presume that the kids will get a cultural shock !

Kolkata is a city I fell in love with during my PhD days. The values of the city are just the opposite of what Delhi is known for. However, we will leave all that discussion on values and the way of living of an average Kolkatan for some other day. The topic of this post is the sweet language spoken in the city.

Almost all western Indian dialects and languages have a variety of hard words which require the toungue to be acrobatic and touch against the upper part of the mouth for correct pronounciation (ड, ळ etc). Bangla (or Bengali) is a soft language not having any place for such harsh sounds. The people are also, on average, lot gentler than their counterparts in northern India. During my stay and visits to that city for the last 8 years, I am yet to see a bus conductor who would talk to pessangers in impolite way. In Delhi, one is accustomed to hear "oye, ticket liya ke?", no matter what is your age. But in Kolkata, one would more likely hear "Kaku, ticket?" if one is old enough to be referred to as an uncle, otherwise it will be "dada" (or "didi" for the other gender) in place of "kaku". For the sake of completeness, I should comment that "harsh words" of anothe kind do exist in Bangla but one is not likely to hear them if the company one keeps is good enough. In north, a certain off spinner can get away by calling an australian player a "monkey" by reasoning that he was using a different word common in north India. That excuse is unlikely to hold in West Bengal.

When I first landed in Kolkata, I did not have any prior experince with Bangla. One can even manage without knowing the language since most people understand Hindi. But since I had planned to stay there for many years (how many was not known at that time, true to the nature of what PhD means), I decided to learn at least some part of the language. This is where the problems began.

Being an alien in that land, the first problem I faced was that of discerning the subtle differences in the Bengali pronounciation of similar sounding words such as "brush" and "brass". To my untrained ears both these words would sound as "Braash". It soon became clear to me that it was much easier to understand the difference between "homomorphism" and "isomorphism". As a PhD student giving up was not an option on any task undertaken. However, just like one does not take the task of attempting to prove (or disprove) P!=NP as the topic of one's PhD thesis, once the history of the problem is known, I too decided to change guard. "Wouldn't it be easier to learn the alphabets instead ?", I reasoned to myself. Afterall no pronononciation is involved, no collision with the dialets of east Midnapore will happen and one need not understand an alphabet in real time. And so I hatched the plan of learning the alphabet first and the spoken language later.


The first few alphabets were easy to add to the set of alphabets recognized by my little brain. I could just read the names of the shops and sometimes make one to one correspondence with the English names written on the same board. At other times, pattern recognition (which incidentally was a course I was studying those days) techniques came handy. I learned that recognizing patterns is not only useful to detect cancer in genome data, but also in learning new alphabets. Add to this the fact that the entropy of natural languages is known to be small (Reference: Chapter 2 of Douglas Stinson's book titled Cryptography: Theory and practice, CRC press). Using this idea, I could learn the remaining letter to be "tha" if the first few characters were "bhoo-ta-naa-". Anything else would not make sense. This approach reaped good dividend, but had a limitation which was not easy to overcome. The shops do not change their names very often. Once I had learned all the characters used on the shops in front of my institute, there was no easy way for me to increase the "alphabet power" (similar to "word power"), specially because I rarely went anywhere other than my rented flat and the institute.


It is at this time that a decrepit cinema hall between my flat and the institute came in handy. It was on the road which I used to walk on daily to reach my institute. It was notorious (some would say famous) for showing movies of a special genre. This genre was known by the rather oblique epithet of "jawani series" in my hostel at IIT-Delhi. This name was ostensibly given because most movies of this line of creativity had the word "jawani" in their title. Although realms have been written by PhD students of literature on the problems of translation and how the meaning is lost in the process, I guess the readers of this blog will not face any problem even if I write the titles of these movies in English. Actually, that explains the universality of this genre - These movies can be "enjoyed" even in the absence of a sound system or sub-titles. Some classics from this class of movies have been titled "The game of youth", "Lost the youth in village fare", "The fire of youth", etc, where the word "youth" has been used in place of the original "jawani". Interestingly, may a times, the movie would be in Telegu or English, but the poster would almost invariably have the title in the local langauage.

Since movies used to change every week (and sometimes even earlier if the "response" to a particular one was not good), I had lot of new alphabets to see and learn. It did not take me more than few weeks to learn almost all the alphabets of the language.

Today, when I look back at my quest for and subsequest success in learning the alphabets of this beautiful language, I can only say one thing. "O' Bhadra-log, I learned the letters of your language the abhadra way."