Being a person who has just returned from Paree after a rather grand 5 nights and 6 days, I can say I'm a bit of an authority on French, if I may say so myself.
The French language is beautiful, eloquent and poetic. There is one small problem with it though. Any poor soul who lands in France without an a French degree will be completely lost, at sea, helpless, you get the drift...
This is exactly what happened to me, I can't understand French even if my life depended on it. All I know is "Parlez vous France" means understand French or something similar to that, so I would tell any Frenchman trying to converse with me, "No parlez vous France" and he'd look at me like I ate a toad in front of him.
My long stay in the country helped me learn the ways of the French and their language and I have come to a simple, yet very effective method of learning French. It might sound very complex and difficult at first, but when you understand what I'm saying, it will be a piece of cake. The trick is as follows:
"In order to converse/write in French, one must append the fifth letter of Anglais alphabet to a word population comprising 95% or thereabouts of the Anglais language."
For those of us who grew up reading _______(fill in the blanks with any topic) for Dummies, it translates into this - add the letter 'e' to 95% of the words
in English and you have French. If you really want to become a French literary figure, you would only have to add a whole lot of letters in between each word and simply forget to pronounce them. Confidently silence critics by saying they are silent letters.
Memories of a drama by Crazy Mohan came flooding back to me when I heard the French pronounce words. In it, a superstitious Crazy Mohan's (his name in the drama is Sivaram) wife concludes that the name Sivaram is the cause of all their woes and promptly calls a Nameology expert in to change it. Names suggested ranged from Savaram to Savam to Sivaaraajxtpm. With jxtp being silent letters in the last name. At that time, it sounded extremely far fetched and funny, however, in France, no one would have batted an eyelid to a person with a name like that pronounced Sivaram. Here are a few prime examples:
- Fresnes (a place name) is pronounced Frene
- Val d'Europe (a mall) is pronounced Val d'hope
- Montevrain (another place) is pronounced Montevrey
- Calais becomes Calay
- English becomes Anglais
Sitting a quiet place and brooding on life makes you wonder how much of money must be wasted by the French. Just imagine, on the road they have huge signboards where precious space and materials are used to point you in the direction of Fresnes, when all you need is Frene. In fact, I bet a French book of 500 pages would come down to around 200 if the silent letters are eliminated. Think of the environmental impact of this! Come to think of it, do you think the French language is in its present state because of classic French writers who tried filling pages?
On the 14th day of the 8th month of the 9th year of this millennium, I boarded a train at an unearthly hour at London's St. Pancras International station. In my sleepy, groggy mind, I had no idea that in a few hours, I'll be one of the millions of people who have travelled from London to Chennai Central station. By train.
Allow me to give you some perspective. The normal flying time between London and Chennai is 10.5 hours, and that's if you get a direct flight. I covered the distance in 2.5 hours flat.
Before I start gloating over the achievement, could someone please tell me if Chennai has been renamed Paris? I'm aware there is a Parry's inside Chennai, but have they named the entire city after that corner? I ask, because, when I got down at Chennai Central, for some strange reason the name board read Paris Gare du Nord. I was going to Paris for a holiday with the wife, so you may say, if it said Paris Gare du Nord and you wanted to go to Paris Gare du Nord, it must be PGdN. Wrong. It was Chennai Central, I'm sure.
Here's why. We got onto the platform and immediately noticed the following:
- It was almost uncomfortably warm;
- None of the sign boards were in a language we could understand;
- The tracks were littered with, well, litter;
- The station was extremely crowded;
- The people looked at us as with more than a hint of suspicion; and most importantly,
- The toilet at the station charged us 1 Euro to take a leak in a dirty, smelly loo.
Now tell me, was I wrong in thinking I'd dosed off on the wrong train and somehow landed in Chennai Central? I only realised I'm at the intended destination when I left the station. There were no auto drivers fighting over who got the honour of my business.
Once outside the station, we had no doubts in our minds that we were indeed in Paris. Except while driving. The city was reasonably clean, well laid out and the buildings were simply amazing. The roads were comparatively wide (you must remember, I'm comparing the roads to London where roads are no wider than an old man's komanam).
However, Parisian drivers are a different thing altogether. They have the patience of a bee in a bottle - much like their Chennai counterparts. If you don't start moving at a brisk pace the microsecond the signal turns green, you can be darned sure that the driver behind you is going to glue his/her hand to the horn. This comes as a bit of a shock considering I've come from England where the drivers would allow you to complete your tea party and say tally-ho to your friends before a polite toot to draw your attention to the fact the signal changed to green last year and you're holding traffic up.
Quickly recovering from initial confusion and shock, I made swift progress and landed up in Disneyland, where we were lost in the magic of the place, with only the heat reminding us of Chennai.
PS: I just got back from a foren trip, so I am going to write a number of posts on crazy things that happened/occurred to me while in Paris :)
Its summer, the sun shines, occasionally, the birds chirp all the time and life is generally hunky dory because everyone in Europe is in some other country on holiday. Especially bosses. So its all good.
Clients tend to take holidays too and generally the priorities of the big bad world of business shift, not everything is due yesterday and there are less fires to fight. So now is when companies bring out the artists in their employees.
With the focus shifting partially from business, companies now use this time to train their employees. Accounting standards that have long been forgotten are refreshed, ways of auditing that are alien to you are taught and expected to be applied.
However, none of this interests me more than to help me earn my 3 square meals a day. What I would really like to do is to spend a day after each training course analysing the doodles each person has indulged in during the training.
I'm not quite sure what it is that triggers the scribble happy hormone in the body, is it the free paper, free pen, free coasters or the extreme boredom of a classroom session, one will never know, but without exception, everyone doodles. I'm sure it would make an interesting case study on doodling trends. We could probably learn truckloads about the employee from what they doodle.
Some are inherently artistic and draw exquisite pencil sketches while pretending to take notes and listen, others who are less gifted, like me, simply settle down to identifying fancy, out of this world ways of writing/signing their own name.
During the 8 hours I was in training this week, I would have signed my name at least 450 times (I kind of lost count around the 300 mark). The person sitting next to me put Picasso to shame with around 4 master pieces while two others on my table tied their cross-knots duel at 30 each.
So tell me, what do you doodle when you're in training? Answers which even vaguely imply that you listen to the lecture will be taken with more than a pinch of salt.
This post, much like the rest of me, is terribly late. This seems to be marathon season, full marathons, half marathons, 24, triathlons, 24. Except for marathons of the 24 variety, of which I am a veteran, I admire the tenacity and discipline marathoners of the physical exertion variety display, whether it is for a cause or simply to prove a point to themselves.
A recent case in point is my sister who just completed her first half marathon.
Most women, particularly Indian women tend to use childbirth as an excuse to lay off exercise and conveniently blame children for their being unable to shed weight (I know I'm going out on a limb and being very stereotypical here, apologies to all hurt feelings). This, in many cases, is a valid and true fact - one that I find very sexist since men cannot use the same excuse for not losing weight. I digress. My sister has always been an oddball fitness freak of nature in the BBC household (BBC for those who are wonder what it is, stands for Bala's Belly Corporation, an affectionate nickname my father had when in school). So it comes no surprise that this freak was the one to complete said marathon. Kudos to her and I find myself sadly short of words that adequately describe how I feel.
You know what I think about marathon runners? They're nuts, dumb, don't know the ways of the world. Don't get me wrong, but there are marathons that are run and marathons that are participated in. Most marathoners fall into the former category, yours truly falls in the latter. That, I believe, is the smart way to do it. Sure, with the right training, one can run the whole distance, but what if one does not have to run, but still finishes the marathon? So how does one participate without the road runner act? Simple, take an auto rickshaw for part of the way.
Allow me to explain. When I was in school, we were required to run a torturous 10km run every morning come rain or snow (unfortunately snow never came to Lovedale, but rain did come, in bucket loads). The route was as circuitous as it gets. We'd have to start off from Top Flats and literally patrol the school campus and come back via Junior School to Senior School. Now, the distance from Top Flats to Senior School is 500 metres, why one would take a 10km route in the first place was beyond me, but no one listened to me. The genius in me, on this occasion, was suppressed. That, however, did not stop it altogether.
A group of around 6-7 of us would amble along at the very end of the crowd making sure no boy is left behind, wounded or otherwise eaten by a passing leopard. In a gratitude-less world, this free, selfless service was rewarded with reprimand from KB, the physical instructor. However, reprimands never stopped us from doing what we loved, service to society, so this happened every morning.
One day, said genius had an epiphany. Every morning we pass the school garages and the school auto rickshaw would just be starting off on its daily milk run. Why not save the environment a little bit by taking a ride on an otherwise empty auto rickshaw? So we all piled in. We would have travelled the sum total of 549 metres when the vehicle was stopped, by none other than KB. What's worse, the checkpoint was right outside my house.
Like most teachers, KB had lost his sense of humour and ability to recognise genius somewhere around year 33 of his career. Needless to say, he did not take kindly to our little act of innovation and we were made to kneel down for half an hour, outside my house. It was a case of so close yet so far.
So, I ask my sister, you were the clever one in our family (and I've always been the black sheep), pray, why didn't you take an auto rickshaw on your half marathon? Shortage of 'ricks in your part of the US of A?
Nevertheless Saumya, I'm proud of your achievement (despite running like everyone else in the marathon)!
