We were there first !

Long, long after the magical or mysterious conception of many of our Indian mythological kings and Gods, the science of artificial insemination finally reached the Western world and a mere 30 years ago from today, the first recorded test tube baby was born. Louise Brown , born on 25th of July 1978. But we were there first.

When our grandmothers narrated the stories of Ramayana and Mahabharata to us, I was too young to wonder how one woman can bear a 100 sons or how a human can mother a monkey. Such details were left unexplained by the elders and unexplored by our young minds since the fact that Hanuman can grow himself to any size he wants was more fascinating than how he was born.

But just as we were growing up and the birds and bees started pecking into areas of the brain cells having direct anatomical connections, arrived Ramanand Sagar with Ramayana and Mahabharata on TV. Just as we were starting to discover certain mysteries regarding pro-creation of life, Rama and Sita arrived directly on the television screens of our home. Suddenly, Hanuman’s expanding form or Kumbhakaran’s ability to sleep was not as exciting as the love between Ram and Sita or the Raas Leelas of Krishna. The details censored by our grandmothers were now being exposed to us in a way any viewer of Indian cinema could understand. By then , we knew that a girl puking would mean that she is pregnant which was a good thing or bad, depending on her marital status. Yes, I’m still to figure out how a doctor can confirm pregnancy by just feeling the nerves of the wrist, but who knows maybe its some bit of knowledge hidden in the shastras and passed on only to Medical students in India ? Back to the point, when the screen focussed on two flowers moving shakily towards each other, we knew that the next scene would show Ayodha erupting with joy at the birth of a new baby (somehow the image of Sita puking is ungodly and unsavoury, so that bit was not shown - after all, morning sickness is for us lesser mortals).
But what we failed to fathom, and thereby marvel at, were the other kinds of bizarre conception. Some examples :
1. Lord Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata and Shatrughna were born to the three wives of King Dasharath after they consumed ‘pudding’.
2.Anjana, Hanuman’s mother was offered some of the ‘pudding’ by Pawan, the Hindu deity of wind, and gave birth to Pawan Putra Hanuman.
3.Pandu, the father of the Pandavas , was cursed not to have children and both his wives, Kunti and Madri, gave birth to the 5 pandavas after ‘boons’ from different Gods.
Amar Chitra Katha comics usually depicted these intriguing scenes with a lady bowing her head deferentially to receive the blessing from the Gods who were giving them the ‘prasad’ (holy food). But the television screens glared and intrigued us with the hidden meaning behind the look in the eyes of the heroine. Reading a comic was often done in isolation, but watching the TV was a collective experience and the silence and uncomfortable coughs of the elders during such scenes were enough to convince us that there was more to it then meets the eyes.
Time makes us all wiser and as new vistas of knowledge were opened to me, I realised that these were probably cases of artificial insemination. They were all test tube babies, much, much before Louise Brown and was a testimony to the powerful science hidden in the shastras written eons ago.
Harman Baweja could not show it in Love Story 2050, but a day may come when scientists find a way for people to expand to any size they want (and conversely shrink to any size they want – such a welcome thought for the likes of me), but we already had Hanumanji doing it ages ago. Cloning may have just taken off in the west, but cross species transplant ? Hah, it’s a long way off, I am sure, but we already have Ganeshji. If and when cross species transplant happens, I may not be around, but definitely some other Indian like me will say, We were there first…!

Kobhi Kobhi

Native speakers of the Assamese language have always struggled with pronouncing the Hindi words in the correct way. Like me, most of my fellow Assamese speakers have a tendency to round off all words with an extended ‘ao’ where it should be ‘aa’ so that ‘Kabhi kabhi’ sounds like ‘Kobhi kobhi’. The sharp crisp overtones of the Hindi words are chiselled off by our tongues, more used to speaking a language suiting our temperament of being somewhat laid back and easy going. As such, we faced monumental struggle when confronted by the arduous task of speaking the national language, Hindi.
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While at school, we were required to learn Hindi and this added a new dimension to our already existing struggle against all things academic. The only positive that we could think of was that learning Hindi will help us understand Hindi movies better ( this was in the days before subtitles). It did not matter that the dialogues in the hindi movies of the 80s were largely the same, the plots identical and simple enough to be understood by our nearly-10year old brain, but the prospect of not having to ask an elder what the characters were saying, was alluring enough to make us attend the Hindi classes.

And what an onslaught it was. We grappled to understand the concept of the gender of inanimate objects, the ‘ka’ and the ‘ki’, the ‘badi ei’ or the ‘choti ei’ and slowly but surely our collective enthusiasm was beaten to submission, just in time when were were allowed to forgo our lessons any longer. We thus emerged from the classes, able to understand simple dialogues of the hindi movie villains, but unable to make sentences requiring complicated gender bending rules.

So we emerged as a generation of Hindi speaking Assamese-as-mother tonguers, mutilating the language with our half baked knowledge of the same.

But what about our parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts ? What about the generation who were acquainted with Hindi quite late in their lives, when the tongues refuses to bend to any foreign sound ? What happened when time or geographical movement demanded that they move over and break away from their comfort zone of Assamese only ?

They all faced the challenge head on. A simple, but effective counter strategy was to just tweak the Assamese words to sound like Hindi, add a few common Hindi words sounding similar to assamese and fill the gaps with various sounds to confuse the listener and lo and behold, there was a working hindi sentence. So if the Hindi sentence would be ‘Naala saaf kar do’, the Assamese tongue would twist it as ‘Ai, noola thu safa kori deu’. Message conveyed. Mission accomplished. In various regions of the NE, different mutating techniques appeared. One of them is a strategy, which I alluded to in the example above, is the use of qualifying everything with a ‘thu’. For eg, ‘shirt-thu’, ‘joota-thu’, etc. I cringe to recall how my father would request the sales person in a shop in Delhi to show him a shirt – ‘ O shirt-thu dekhai dio’ (dekhai = Assamese for ‘show’, dio = bastardized form of the word diya, meaning ‘give’ in Assamese).

The titles of Ekta Kapoor’s K serials were all mutated to suit her Assamese speaking fan base. Kohani Ghor Ghor ki, Kyunki saas bhi kobhi bohu ti, etc. And yes, it was ‘Kun bonega cororpoti’ for us back home.

Going back to our generation who at least learnt to read and write some Hindi and were thereby more open to the growing influence of media, a new challenge was presented to the ‘I don’t know Hindi’ generation. Some friends started naming their children after some distinctly North Indian sounding names. The resultant mutation at the hands of the older generation can be deduced from the example of my cousin naming her new born son ‘Paarv’ who gets called ‘Paap’(meaning Sin) by my Aunt. Most times, my mother and her likes, camouflage their diability behind words of endearments while confronted with the prospect of calling out such names. Paarv will be called ‘Baba’ more often than not, I am sure.

Hindi spoken the Assamese way –
Danger – 440 ‘bholts’…make whatever sense you want of it !