I am a bit of an observer of different ways in which my countrymen (and women, of course) speak and use English language. I am currently in Hyderabad, and I saw one peculiar thing here, that is the use of the word, “world” in a lot of business establishments. When I visited Hyderabad for the first time, in 2005, I saw a retail outlet called, “Food World”, which is a branded chain of stores selling groceries. I agreed to this name as they were selling food items etc. The same day, I saw a shop called, “Helmet World” and again a showroom named “Furniture World”. I found myself little intrigued and interested to explore further and I found a lot of “worlds” with rejoinders like chicken, computer, diabetes and so on. A latest addition was a consulting firm started by a good friend of mine and he has his own “world”. The other thing I noticed was that the localities call a petrol filling station as a “Petrol Bunk”, which is usually termed as a “Petrol Pump” in North India. Fine, this is the way it works with them. Now, if I move to Delhi, a pre-paid sim card is called “Cash card” and in Mumbai a post-paid connection is called “billing” connection. And, if we talk about Sikhs, they have a sweet way of nick-naming their kids as “Happy”, “Lovely” etc, which makes me start wondering as to how this would have started. Probably it is linked to their communities’ history of immigration to the west. I feel there would be similar examples from other parts of this amazing country as well. I recall that during my childhood, one illiterate woman who used to work as maid in my household, used to refer to any woman as “ledis”. Slowly I observed that even educated people from vernacular medium used to speak like this, for example, “koi ledis aayee hai darwaze per” (some woman is at the doorstep).
I will write on more such anecdotes in future blog posts!
