Geek of All Trades

u r a gr8 man javed sahib

I recently attempted to read a transcript of an online chat with Javed Akhtar. 

Javed sahib is a giant of the Hindi film industry; as a scriptwriter and lyricist on some of Bollywood's most influential films over nearly four decades, he has had a hand in shaping modern Indian culture.  I've talked about Javed sahib at some length here before.  He is a brilliant, thoughtful, erudite, literate, gifted, opinionated man.  I've heard him speak passionately about language - about his own language, Urdu, and also about the effect of the importation (and imposition) of English at all levels of Indian discourse.

So it was a bit of a cognitive disconnect to find his chat transcript loaded with IM-speak - "u" for "you," "ppl" for "people," "gr8" for "great," and so on.  If anything proves that orthography is not necessarily correlated with literacy, it's Javed sahib's use of IM-speak. 

I am not experienced in IM-speak; it is faster for me to type longhand using standard spelling, punctuation, and capitalization than it is to work out the appropriate abbreviations for what I want to say.  So Javed sahib's facility with the shortcuts suggests that he uses them very frequently, so that they are under his fingers to the extent that it is efficient for him to use them. 

I understand that communication via SMS - text messaging - is even more widespread in India than in my own United States, where it is still largely a medium of teenage communication.  In India, where the cellular and internet infrastructure is in far better shape than the conventional telephone infrastructure, SMS is prevalent among a much broader slice of society.  It is conceivable that even the exalted literati really do use it every day; hence Javed sahib's fluency in IM-speak.

I lack that fluency, and therefore found the transcript exceedingly hard to read.  Judge for yourself:  Over at BollyWHAT? you can find a post containing the original transcript, and another post with my heavily edited version of it, in which I have rearranged the text so that answers immediately follow the corresponding questions - and translated the IM-speak into standard orthography. 

Desi in Boston

My friend Amit has joined the blogosphere with Desi in Boston, where he's writing about the many interesting topics that strike his fancy - movies, politics, the environment, computers, and more.  He's already collected a nice list of links to food blogs.  I've added him to my meager blogroll at the right - please pay him a visit. 

Juzo Itami's Tampopo

I've always loved the Japanese film Tampopo, ever since I first saw it when I was in high school, shortly after its original release.  Sometimes described as a "noodle western," the film intersperses its main story - a woman's quest to make the perfect bowl of noodles - is interspersed with tiny vignettes that explore the many and varied roles of food in the lives of humans.

These roles are diverse, but they are all essential - the film fugues on food and business, food and sex, food and death, food and culture, just to name a few.  In one vignettes, a group of salarymen attend a lavish French restaurant.  Each orders the exact same simple meal that the boss has selected - right down to the drink.  At the end of the table, though, a young man dares to flout the unwritten rules of business, engaging in a thorough dialogue with the waiter about every nuance of the menu before ordering a rich, exotic meal.  In another vignette, a dying woman's last act is to prepare a simple fried rice for her family, which they eat, sobbing frantically, as she collapses and dies at the foot of the table.  It sounds horrible, and it is - but somehow there is also a dark humor, a wry mood that permeates even the most outlandish scenes in the film. 

It is in the film's main story, though, that the late filmmaker Juzo Itami's knack for creating quirky characters really shines.  It begins when two itinerant truckdrivers duck into a roadside noodle shop on a rainy night.  Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a gruff and manly, sports a cowboy hat and moves with the deliberate languidness of a man who has spent a lot of time on his own - he is probably the reason for the "noodle western" epithet.  Goro's sidekick Gun (Ken Watanabe) is more sprightly and energetic, but less philosophical.  The noodle shop is owned and run by Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), a sad, struggling single mother.  After Goro criticizes her noodles she begs him to help her make them better, and so begins their quest.  They conduct reconnaissance missions to competing noodle shops, peering through windows and bribing or tricking employees into giving up the secrets of their toothsome noodles or flavorful broths.  They collect a rag-tag bunch of allies as well - an elderly chef who is a master of broth, a driver who also happens to make the best noodles in town, a contractor willing to spiff up the shop's interior.  Tampopo trains with Olympic fervor, obsessively focused on that perfect bowl of noodles.

The story and its characters are delightfully peculiar.  Everyone has an opinion on what makes a perfect noodle - this is not merely a matter of taste and texture, but of philosophy, the very stuff of existence.  That is why the vignettes sprinkled throughout the film work so well, despite their disconnect from Tampopo's quest - they illustrate and expand upon the musings of Goro and his friends.

Some people probably don't care for the genre of "food movies" - I guess I am not one of those people, as films like Eat Drink Man Woman and Big Night, as well as Tampopo, consistently figure among my favorites.  Food is obviously essential to life, but it is also so much more than that - a decadent pleasure, a focus of family and social life, a defining aspect of culture and ethnicity.  Tampopo illuminates the many facets of the relationship between people and their food, from all angles.    

It was a great treat to finally obtain this film on DVD. I believe there must have been a dispute over distribution rights following Juzo Itami's death, because for many years there were no new copies available in the US and the film is so wonderful and popular that used copies on Amazon or eBay were going for as much as $300.  I was pleased to discover recently that Amazon is now carrying an import edition from Japan for a very reasonable price.  (It does have English subtitles, and I had no trouble playing it in my US DVD player, though some of the user comments suggest these might be problems).   When I got this DVD I watched Tampopo for the first time in perhaps ten years, and was delighted to find that I not only remembered nearly every scene, but that I still enjoyed every bit as much as the first time I saw it. 

Grammar-wallah

व्याकरण-वाला  Grammar-wallah

You've probably seen usage of the suffix "-wallah" such as the title of this post.  It's used in English to mean "a person employed in a particular occupation or activity:"  a taxi-wallah drives a cab; the shop-wallah runs the local grocery.  You might even be aware that "-wallah" is of Indian origin.  The suffix is an English borrowing from Hindi of the extremely useful suffix -वाला, which is rendered as "-wallah" in English.  In this post I will use the more rigorous transliteration "-vaalaa". 

In Hindi, -vaalaa does just what its borrowed cousin does in English, but it also does a lot more.  There is no English equivalent, borrowed or otherwise, with the breadth of this fascinating little morpheme.  So in this post, I will introduce you to some of the many and varied uses of -vaalaa.

First, adding -vaalaa to a noun carries the means:  a person employed in an (understood) activity relating to the noun.   In Hindi, the रिक्शे-वाला rikshe-vaalaa drives the rickshaw; the चाय-वाला chaay-vaalaa serves the tea (chai), the साड़ी-वाला saa.Dii-vaalaa sells sarees.  That's the usage that has found its way into English.

-vaalaa can also be added to adjectives, to give a slightly emphatic or particularizing force, or to serve the purpose that the pronoun "one" serves in English:
क्या आप पीली-वाली साड़ी चाहती हैं? kyaa aap piilii-vaalii saa.Dii chaahatii hai.n?   Do you want the yellow sari?  (-vaalii is the feminine form of -vaalaa; Hindi has grammatical gender.)
नहीं, लाल-वाली । nahii.n,  laal-vaalii.  No, the red one.

In fact, -vaalaa can be added to pretty much any noun (including verbal nouns), adverb, or noun phrase, to give it adjectival (or even nominal) properties.

दोपहर dopahar, afternoon
-----> दोपहर-वाली गाड़ी dopahar-vaalii gaa.Dii, the afternoon train

पीले फूल piile phuul, yellow flowers
------> पीले फूल-वाली साड़ी - piile phuul-vaalii saa.Dii, the sari with the yellow flowers

हिंदी बोलना hi.ndii bolanaa, to speak Hindi
---->  हिंदी बोलने-वाले hi.ndii bolane-vaale - Hindi speakers (-vaale is the masculine plural form of -vaalaa)

उपर upar, above; upstairs
-----> उपर-वाला कमरा upar-vaalaa kamaraa, the room upstairs, the upstairs room

------> उपर-वाला upar-vaalaa, the guy upstairs; i.e., God

Now things really start to get interesting.  When used with an infinitive verb, -vaalaa turns the infinite into an adjective meaning "being about to" carry out the verb. 

जाना jaanaa, to go

जाने-वाला jaane-vaalaa, about to go

-----> दिल्ली-वाली गाड़ी जाने-वाली है | dillii-vaalii gaa.Dii jaane-vaalii hai, the Delhi-bound train is about to leave.

होना honaa, to be, to become, to happen

होने-वाला hone-vaalaa, about to be, about to become, about to happen

-----> माँ होने-वाली maa.N hone-vaalii, about to become a mother; i.e., pregnant

-----> बारिश होने-वाली है । baarish hone-vaalii hai, rain is about to happen; i.e. it is about to rain

Finally, constructions with -vaalaa can be used in place of relative clauses like "the woman who works here."  Hindi has a separate structure for creating relative clauses, but sometimes use of -vaalaa is simpler and more direct.

यहाँ काम करना yahaa.N kaam karanaa, to work here

यहाँ काम करने-वाली औरत मेरी बहन है । yahaa.N kaam karane-vaalii aurat merii bahan hai, the woman who works here is my sister.

Those are some common uses of -vaalaa, a very handy and versatile little morpheme - one of my favorite features of Hindi.