yeh hubli ki chok bhaasha baa !

It was 7 am. 

My table clock, in snooze mode, was trying in vain to bring me back to reality world. And then, finally a voice woke me up … rather shook me up as my ears sent some signals to my sleeping brain cells which really needed to be woken up to interpret this particular piece of data . 

The signal read ‘Yen macha, ut jaa .. late ho gaya’ …

NOW, I knew just about enough kannada to know 'Yen' mean 'what'. It’s the 2^nd word which my brain cdn’t decode : Macha ! M-A-C-H-A… NO .. not there in my database ! maybe my ears erred !

‘What did u say bro ?’ I asked

‘Its late macha’ my room-mate replied.

MACHA !!?? .. NOW my ears can’t cheat me twice in 5 seconds.  User Input was indeed correct then ! … Time to ‘ADD NEW to DATABASE’ (dbms was always my fav)

To enlighten myself then, i asked  ‘What is this ‘MACHA’ ? is it a slang ?’

Nahi BAA ! aisa kuch nahi.. Macha is a casually used term here. Tu jaldi ready ho BAA !

Great ! 'Macha' was not even being processed completely, now this BAA came ! what  BAA ? Baa as in the grandma Baa of saas-bahu serials ??! Was he going to tell me that is also a casually used term ?

Too many cooks spoil the broth. Macha was enuf for today. Maybe I’ll learn more new things myself with time. So I didn’t bother him to ask about the BAA theory.

IN CLASSROOM, as I was trying to note down the points written on the blackboard (yes, I was crazy enuf to make notes then :D), this one guy asked me 

‘Itna kyun gudaadke likh raha baa … will take Xerox notes from some1’ …

NOW, I had come across that popular ‘khunal-khunalke’ in that famous Hyderabadi comedy flick. Maybe ‘Gudaadke’ was something close to that ! Interesting :D … I was indeed learning a lot here from 1^st day itself ! And by this time, I had also found out that ‘macha’ and ‘baa’ were indeed commonly used terms.

At lunch-break, after a formal introduction to each other, I went to college canteen with 2 later-to-become-good friends.

‘main fried rice loonga’’ I decided.

“Fried Rice nako ! Dosa ” one of them said.

So then ! I was literate enuf to understand this one. But still, the word Nako ??!! isn’t that a Marathi word ? did he intentionally use it as a Marathi word ? I asked him about it.

‘yeh belgaum ke lok yahan aake sab Marathi mix karte hain’, remarked the other. 

Hmm ! .. sensitive issue i thought . Shouldn’t go ahead with this one !

Later, in the day, one of them was narrating some story of his, at the end of which I remarked “tu chaava hai bey” ... Now 'chaava' is a Mumbai-special used for addressing ‘Cool Dude’. Obviously, both of them were alien to this gyaan. In a perfect sync, both reacted ‘KYA???’. I explained what I meant and told them I’ll be careful not to add the Mumbai spice to my hindi next time.

‘arey, aisa kuch nahi baa. U speak hindi in your style. We will learn the mumbaiyya hindi from you. Tujhe maalum nahi kya ? hubli is called ‘Chota Mumbai’’.. one of them stated.

Chota Mumbai ??!! Going by the geographical areas of both the cities, even CHOTA sounds ridiculous . So whats the logic for this title then ??

‘The spirit of young Hubli is on par with the Mumbai spirit’ justified one.

‘The crime level in Hubli is almost touching the Mumbai level now’, said another.

‘So does Hubli pride itself to be tagged as ‘Chota Mumbai’ when Mumbai itself is planning to become India’s Shanghai’ I asked them. The rest of the discussion was irrelevant as we went on and on about how cities should strive to have their own identities and all.

Anyways, coming back to their offer of me teaching them Mumbaiyaa Hindi, i co-relate this one with that famous joke in which Lalu Prasad Yadav is sent to United States to learn English and when his wife Rabri Devi calls up to check out his progress, Bill Clinton answers ‘Haalo, hum Bilva bol raha hun’..

Because later, when I went home to celebrate Diwali, my parents and friends were shocked to find my upgraded version of Hindi, which was now coming out so naturally to me. My friends threatened they would cold-blooded murder me if they hear me using ‘BAA’ again.

Back in Hubli, once i went to a near-by stationary shop to purchase a bath-soap.

'Uncle, ek LifeBouy saabun dena', i said.

After going through his stock uncle replied back, 'LifeBuoy nahin hai, Cinthol saabun hona kya ??

If i were to make a shudh Angrezi translation of this one, it would translate as :

'I don't have LifeBuoy, do you want Cinthol to happen ??'

Thankfully, my brain had become more smarter since the 'macha' experience and it decoded 'hona kya' part successfully :).

Those were the days when Mungaru Male songs had become a sensation in the whole of Karnataka.  I liked them too especially ‘anisutidhe’ for it’s purity and ofcourse Sonu Nigam. As I queued up the songs in my playlist, my roommate made sure I wasn’t missing out on Mungaru Male songs. As ‘anisutidhe’ started playing,

‘wat a singer. Tujhe pasand ha ki nahin Sonu nigam ?' i asked him.

‘haan yaar. Unhe mast gaata. Lekin Unhe kannada songs bahut kam gaata' he replied.

‘Sahi baat hai. Kyunki Use hindi songs ke liye jyaada paise milte hai. ‘ I reasoned and waited in anxiousness to see if he observed me and if he rectifies his Unhe with Use in his next sentence.

‘lekin, I feel after this Mungaru Male success, Unhe kannada songs bhi gayega’ he said.

Rectification was Done ! the other way around though. Very Soon, Use became a history in my own Hindi Vocabulary.