My Snell is Cooler than Yours

Written by new field correspondent Bawarchi!

I met Pratap and the Kumars around 4 years ago and my copy of Snell has seen a lot of action. So much that, like an extra-loved teddy bear, it started showing some serious signs of wear after a couple years. Whole chapters were coming loose and I started to become reluctant to use it anymore since it was hard to open without pages escaping everywhere. Well...isme kya faida hoga? So I finally I dropped it off at a copying-binding-cell phone accessory-bus ticket-pav bhaji shop in Pune the other day and came back in a couple days to find:

It's a hard cover now! Well it takes up just a bit more precious space in my backpack but, man, it's pretty bomb proof. I can hardly even open it all the way, they stitched the binding through all the pages so tightly. But it works and it's been thoroughly Indiafied which makes me so proud of my little Snell. But the best part is:

I had forgotten I had left my special bookmark inside. It's my ticket stub from A.R. Rahman and Company's show in Oakland back in June. (It was a kick ass show by the way. Sukhwinder did an extended Chhaiyya Chaiyya that had everyone on their feet...well at least everyone in our section.) It got sewed into the binding and is now conjoined with the second chapter. I just think it's all too cool. Am I strange and geeky about this? Very well, I am strange and geeky about this and I am confessing right here that I joined this blog's team just so I could tell the world how cool my Snell is.

But just to be responsible, here's an awesome sign for you all to practice your devanagari reading skills. Hint: You don't need to know a word of Hindi to know what products and services are being offered.

Till next time...I'll see if I can snap any more good practice signs here in Bombay.

Eddie

Read That Sign! round 3

The more Hindi I learn, the more I see in my photos from India (summer 2006). Here's a detail from a picture of a street in Agra. I'm proud to say I got this one right away. If you click on the photo, you'll be taken to the original, full photo, where I put the transliteration and some notes. You'll also see what was really the subject of the photo....

Pratap isn't the only one who writes postcards.

I got a postcard from my friend Aditya in Mumbai!


After 40 minutes, I had written out and looked up every word I could - and then had to turn to a friend for help reading and/or getting the meaning of the others. I need more patience - I get so frustrated when I can't read. But on the other hand, probably getting a taste of what iliteracy is like is a very useful thing.

The really cool part of this - other than getting a postcard from a foreign country, yay! - was that once someone told me what the words were, I could see how they knew. Once I knew what I was looking for, I could see it. Maybe that's dumb, but it feels like an improvement over _not_ being able to see it, at least. I did know quite a few words and was able to look up several more - v satisfying as well.

The transliteration is on the photo's Flickr page (with line breaks as they appear on the postcard), with much help from the glossary at the back of Snell and from Filmi Geek.

Oh! And the picture!

lyrics in Devanagari

I've run across Navin Kabra's Archive of Hindi Movie Songs site many times and never explored it. But today I finally poked around and discovered that the site has a ton of songs written out in Devanagari - and indexed in seven ways (including type of song - qawwalis, birthday, rain, etc.), which makes my inner library really happy. In honor of my recently watching Teesri Manzil, maybe I'll try to read O Haseenaa Zulfonwaalee during my lunch hour.

Read That Sign! round 2

After reading Ultrabrown's post on the Wagah Border and its delightful/baffling display of patriotism, I flipped through some pictures from my trip there in July 2006. Here's a sign that faces you as you enter the Indian side of the arena (that might not be quite the right term, but it's stepped seats full of cheering crowds, so it seems to fit).

I feel like I should be able to identify these words, but I can't quite do it. My guess is:
svarn jayantee dvaar
With the help of Word AnyWhere, maybe this is
gold ____ gate. Now if only I could figure out the _____.

typing in Devanagari

I found a post on the ePandit Hindi blog yesterday that appears to be a review of various systems for typing in Devanagari. I can't remotely read the post, and if someone would like to summarize it for me, I'd be grateful. But links know no linguistic bounds, so I was able to find Bahara, (which Filmi Geek had already told me about), HindiWriter, and Bhasha. I haven't had time to play with any of these, and I will be gob-smacked if any of them work on a Mac (and then I'll dance a merry jig).

I also thought I should let you know why I haven't been getting much Hindi done over the summer. My regular tutor was gone for the summer, studying in Jaipur, but I lined up a really good substitute. Or so I thought.

He may be a native speaker, but it turns out that he was really keen to use his English while in the US. He was also still feeling a little shy, and he was convinced that if he spoke in Hindi his low profile would be blown and throngs of screaming girls would ruin his vacation. And whenever I tried to crack the book, he insisted on turning it to this particular page, even though I'm only in chapter three....

Think writing your date's name in Devanagari is a show-stopper? Think twice.

This tale from Hindi student Katherine Russel Rich admittedly has little to do with learning Hindi but packs a wallop in just two pages. And it mentions her forthcoming book about her experiences spending a year in India studying, titled Unspeakable: A Story About India and Life in Other Words. Looks great.

Thanks to friend, journalist, and international woman of mystery and beauty Anubha for the story.