My Bambaiyya Hindi is Better Than Your North-Indian Hindi

Igrew up in the suburbs of Mumbai and apun ka childhood was really fatte. Kids would do a lot of bol bachchan on the ground but then had to back their shanpatti with kadak football skills. Those merely engaging in bhankaas were taken to the khopcha and given kharcha paani. One couldn’t go home and do panchayat about the lafda that happened on the ground because no one wants to be friends with a phattu who complains to mom. Also, because your bantai log wouldn’t be pleased, and tereko dho dalega. We believed in being bindaas and settling our nalla problems sumadi mein.

As we got into school, I turned out to be an average student who ended up scoring below average marks in Hindi. “Tereko kitna aaya?” I would ask my friend who also barely managed to scrape through. “Yaar apan to poora din Hindi mein-ich baat karte hai, sala phir locha kya hai?” we would wonder, staring at our paper, where we’d scored so less that our paper had more red markings than the US map after the 2016 Presidential Election. And just like that, we cleared school with thakela marks and never had to deal with Hindi in academics again.

All this while, no one ever told us that something was wrong, ki apunke Hindi mein jhol tha. How could they? The Bombay around us only validated and legitimised our tapori bhasha, because that is how everyone spoke all the time.

The rickshawallah wouldn’t look at you unless you addressed him as boss, we just assumed that the entire world had cutting chai as well, and no one ever questioned the use of the word rapchik as a compliment. It is like our little internal code that only we understand and are comfortable with. We Mumbaikars can be simultaneously impolite and find beauty in it. In my view, it is a generous dialect; polite, even though it doesn’t sound it. But being the language of the street, it is all-encompassing, temporarily bridging in the span of a conversation, unbridgeable divides.  

As I grew older, in a quest to earn hari patti and make some khokhas, I joined a corporate office and had to travel to every khopcha of the country. One of these happened to be Delhi. I was already a chapter and totally in on the eternal Mumbai vs Delhi fight, ready to give as good as I got.

On my first day in the city, I was in a restaurant with a senior from work, who must be at least 20 years older than me. We were both going through the menu, and he asked me, “Aap kya lenge?”

“Aap?” What the fuck? Was this a prank video? Do I have to look into the hidden camera now? Itni respect? Mumbai – Delhi, we are supposed to hate each other! Man, you’re 20 years older, what is wrong with you? Oh, is he talking to me about Arvind Kejriwal?

It took me a few minutes to cotton on that he wasn’t making fun of me. Within moments of him referring to me as “Aap”, I felt guilty about every person I had spoken to in my life. As a self-respecting Mumbaikar, I don’t believe in aap, hum, and tum. We are from the land of tu, tereko, mereko, and apan.

Through our short conversation, I discovered a new and politer way to say things every 12 seconds and realised how – all these years – apan Hindi ki vaat laga raha tha boss. To ensure that I don’t embarrass myself on the trip again, I just avoided speaking in Hindi altogether as everyone around bombarded me with the sweetness of shudh Hindi. Ah, the disgust! I felt like I’d been thrown into this world and everyone else knew the secret, while I was the only ignorant fool around. Eventually, I overcompensated by trying to be extra polite with people. I didn’t want them to think “Ye kaun yeda aa gaya?”

Yet, I was a bit befuddled with Delhi, where a sentence could begin with the polite tum and could end with a madarchod. How could one be so polite and so rude, so quickly? I was mesmerised by its poetry.

As I spent more time at work, I interacted with several more people from North India, and was more than happy to adopt the sweeter version of the language. I adapted to their tone and words the same way Virat Kohli adapts to a seaming pitch in South Africa. But we all know Mumbai and Delhi aren’t supposed to get along.

So I now have to keep switching between the dialect I speak with my Mumbai friends and the one I adopt for my North Indian friends. Linguistically, I’m always in a constant state of confusion. Until the very last moment, I don’t know whether to reach for an aap or a tu. God forbid, I ever mess up. It’s a bit of a machmach – with consequences.

While interacting with a bantai once, I committed the sin of giving him some respect and referring to him with tum instead of tu, and the horror on his face said it all. It was almost like I’d insulted him, by being polite. “Abey saale!” he retorted, “Job mil gaya to ab pateli marega?” Don’t be formal, he meant, we only get along well when we’re being frank and rude to each other. It’s beautiful too – and personally, this kind of beauty is more than skin deep.

Whenever people start the debate around making Hindi the national language of the country, I’m always amazed. Forget the hundreds of languages and thousands of dialects that we can debate over, we will probably even struggle to come to terms with a mutually agreed version of Hindi. That’s something to celebrate – not struggle over.

PS: Sorry North India, but it’s not gol gappa. There’s puri, there’s pani. It’s pani puri. Chal, ab hawa aane de.

Kitne Attempts Huye? What Failing CA Exams 8 Times Taught Me About Life

I’ve been an average student throughout school and college. The guy not nerdy enough to be in the front bench but not naughty enough to rule the back bench either. I was strictly mediocre, like Akshay Kumar, of whom not a lot was expected but he just seemed to keep doing fine. I scored just enough which ensured that my parents had to never visit college but not enough to avoid comparisons with Sharmaji ka ladka. I never ever failed. And then I enrolled for the chartered accountancy course.

My dad’s a chartered accountant and a lot of my uncles are CAs, and naturally I was going to be a CA. That’s just how Gujarati and Marwari CA families roll. Dad, of course, didn’t tell me that. He told me that if you like math, you should pursue the CA course. This bullshit sales pitch was right up there with the time he convinced me to have paracetamol because it looked just like Polo.

I cleared the entrance exam (CPT) in my first attempt and felt that I could conquer the world. Like Narendra Modi after the 2014 elections. Then came my demonetisation moment: I failed for the first time in my life; I could not clear the IPCC, the second-level exam. And then I failed seven more times while attempting IPCC and the final exam over a torturous period of six years.

As brutal a course CA is, it helps people prepare for and deal with failure in a way that very few things in life do. I will never forget the first time I checked my IPCC result online. My hands were shivering when I had to feed in my roll number and click on the submit button on the ICAI website. And there it was, the cruellest word in the English dictionary – “FAIL”, in all caps. The scores on my marksheet resembled India’s batting scorecard from the fourth innings of the Cape Town Test match. Too many 20s and 30s, not enough 40s and 50s.

Mind you, I had given it all. This was after a year of attending coaching classes for seven hours a day, followed by four months of study at home for 12 hours a day. My schedule was the educational equivalent of Milind Soman’s gym routine. The only other people who follow a timetable so rigorously are cyclists doping at the Tour de France. While I was engrossed in studies, my friends were living the Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara life and posting pictures of Northern Lights from Iceland. After all that sacrifice, I had managed to score 19 out of 100 in the paper on costing.

Failure is a bit like watching porn, the first time is the hardest. It feels awful, and you are ashamed of yourself. You wish you could borrow that invisibility cloak from Harry Potter and hide from this frightful world. When someone would ask me my marks, I would exaggerate them a bit the same way the government exaggerates GDP figures. I couldn’t believe this was possible, it was like watching a Scorpio blow up in a Golmaal movie. I suspected something was fishy and even sent the papers for rechecking. There were no counting mistakes, and no, the Russians didn’t hack anything.

CA may not teach you costing, but it teaches you a lesson in acceptance. You have to pick yourself up and just get on with it. Reflect on your mistakes, and look forward to correcting them with the same syllabus, same routine, same number of hours, all over again from scratch. When you take out the books (thinking you were done with them) and sit down again for the first time, you realise how soul-crushing the cycle is. I solved many additional papers and got specialised coaching on my weak subjects, the same way Sanjay Leela Bhansali had historians to help him on Padmavaat. I would conquer costing if that’s the last thing I did. When the results were announced I was stumped. I scored 17 on 100.

When you fail a couple of times, the dynamic changes. Many friends who were studying with you have already cleared and by now your juniors have become your peers. There is a deep fear at some level that they might clear and go past you as well, the very people who were asking you for advice just a year back. It’s a bit like being Parthiv Patel, and watching eight other wicketkeepers debut after him while he still struggles to cement his place. Self-doubt starts to creep in and you think perhaps you’re just not cut out for this course. Maybe you’re the Shraddha Kapoor of the CA course and you will only star in movies called OK Jaanu. This is the point at which the course becomes a test in character.

As failures continue, you can now count marks on your fingers but need a calculator to count the number of attempts. The pressure starts to mount. Your family starts questioning your hard work and effort, everyone doesn’t have the luxury to be Rahul Gandhi. Most friends have cleared their CA exam and are out of touch, you are bruised and alone like James Franco in 127 Hours. Your battered ego doesn’t allow you to celebrate the success of friends and relatives who have cleared the exam. At times, you become petty and wonder, “How the fuck has that guy cleared the exam and I have not?” The three words that are asked at every family function and social gathering start to haunt you: “Kitne attempts huye?”

I take heart in the fact that CA is one of those exams that most of us fail, and some even go on to attempt the exam for over a decade, well after they are married and in their 30s and 40s. These guys have to manage their  job and also prepare for an examination that demands long hours. The sensible thing is to quit, but some diehards continue their endless pursuit of that esteemed degree.

These people may never clear the exam but all of them have learnt how to deal with something as important as failure right from their young student days. An argument could be made that the syllabus is a bit outdated or the exam encourages mugging up, but what’s beyond doubt, is that CA is a course that prepares you for life.

There is an old adage that students live by that is as true for life as it for CA: “If you fail, do not fear. After May, there is always November.”

When New Year’s Was About Award Shows & Home-made Pizza

When you were a child, adults often treated you like a burden during New Year’s eve, like a home loan or indirect tax. Mom and dad would stuff you with pizza, put you to bed, and then have their share of fun, that could involve anything from drinking lime juice (because it was 1998) to partying at a hotel function (sorry, still can’t admit it, getting naughty).

As you grew a bit older, they no longer had the choice to keep you out of the New Year’s party plan. You were in that phase of life where you had discovered Pokémon, beyblades, Roadies, and porn. It was no longer possible to fool you into eating Chyawanprash by telling you it was chocolate. You knew there was something important attached to New Year’s eve as friends and relatives kept whispering about it in the month of December. Around this time, the family began to gather around the TV to watch Manikchand Filmfare Awards, while feasting on pav bhaji and sipping Thums Up and waiting for a prime ’90s Shah Rukh Khan to lead the countdown to the New Year wearing a bowtie with a black suit.

Many Indian families have spent New Year’s this way. There was a charm to the preparations for the night as mom laid out the new cutlery and napkins that had been saved for occasions like these. It was the only night of the year when you had disproportionate food options, from unlimited popcorn and finger foods to a meal that had starters, fancy dishes (pizza in ’98), drinks, and at least two kinds of dessert. While you sipped on Sprite, dad and uncle had whisky, convinced that they’d fooled a 10-year old into thinking that it was Canada Dry just because it looked golden yellow. Everyone marvelled at the costumes and the Govinda dance number, and every year mom would make the mandatory comment on how beautifully Rekha has aged, a tradition that continues to the day, almost two decades later.

During these Manikchand evenings, the fireworks were grand. This was before we gave a fuck about the environment and climate change. As soon as the clock struck 12, there was incredible noise and everyone rushed to the windows to look at the amazing visuals in the sky. They always overshadowed the confetti and balloon shower on television.

As the years went by, the party shifted from indoors to outdoors but the family stayed constant, and the awkwardness that was once limited to the walls of the house was now in full public view. Everyone had to be dressed in their best, as rings and gold bracelets were also withdrawn from the bank locker for the big night. New Year events hosted by hotels and banquets became the new cool thing in town. By paying a fixed amount, one would get unlimited food, drinks, and entertainment. Being Gujaratis, this was music to my family’s ears.

Instead of watching people dance and perform on screen, we now watched people dance and perform on a stage. It wasn’t just enough to be spectators at these night-outs, as you even had to volunteer to be the guy who’d be cut in half during the magic show segment. It was the time when one grooved to “Made in India” and “I’m a Barbie Girl”. It was a time you discovered that your father acted weird around pretty women.

The real star of the evening though, would be the host at these events, whose enthusiasm was almost impossible to match. The goal of my life is to be as passionate about something as hosts at NYE parties are about the countdown. These were the good ol’ days, when F.R.I.E.N.D.S. hadn’t picked up yet and the concept of the midnight kiss was still alien. People just politely looked at each other and wished them Happy New Year and then, there were fireworks again. Back in the ’90s, fireworks were the dick-measuring contest for events and functions.

Since then, the cult around the New Year party has changed drastically. No matter where you live, there will be a party within a 100-metre radius. Every person you can possibly know is heading to one at a hotel, bar, club, or even their own office. Every channel now has a “special episode” for New Year’s Eve. Even Arnab released a “Best of Arnab” for 31st last year, because that’s how people want to bring in the new year, by listening to a loud middle-aged man scream at 10 other people for two hours.

It is important to be engaged in a plan, no matter how boring or fun because if you have no plan, the most difficult question to answer in life is “31st ko kya kiya?”

As the dreaded day inches closer, and the pressure to have fun consumes us all, I just wish I could be six years old again. I’d have mum tuck me in at 9.30 pm, and by the time I’d wake up, the entire thing would have blissfully ended.