Habanadha...!!!

Languages are absolutely funny. So are the cultural differences. That, if looked at with the right perspective.

My boss casually asked me if there is a way to differentiate names of Indian males and females. Her personal experience of embarrassing herself in many a meeting must have prompted her to ask. I thought for a while and told her "Maybe you can understand like this. If a name ends with a vowel, 90% of the times it'd be that of a female. And if not, the name must be of a male". She smiled and said “Oh….that’s easy!” and in 2 seconds she asked "But the guys working at offshore team Hari and Ravi aren’t males? Their names end with vowels" I smiled back and replied "Their full names are Hariharan and Ravichandran. We came up with short ones for you to easily remember and you gotta know that this 'vowels-logic' does not apply for short names" She quickly said "Ohh…ok. I sort of get it now. And I’ll remember that" Appeared like she bought the idea. Good for me. Then, she asked "Hey Arun, what was the new offshore resource you said would be joining us?" I said the name and she inadvertently mispronounced it. No surprise. And I let it go, as most of the Indian names are a little difficult to be pronounced anyways.

One of my other colleagues standing next to me tried to show what a smarty-pants he is. He corrected her by saying how the name should be correctly pronounced. She mispronounced it again and he said “You are wrong. That’s not how the name should be pronounced”. My boss calmly said "Oh, my pronunciation is wrong?! How about the English that you folks speak? Can we talk about that for a while?" I was almost laughing, as I know where this is heading towards. She looked at me and continued "You know Arun, the other day this gentleman here told me that he went to a shop called waaaalmart. I thought this must be a new shop in this area and I told I’ll go check it out sometime. It took more than 5 minutes for me to figure out he was actually talking about Wal-Mart (which she actually pronounced as w-u-a-l-m-a-r-t or to be exact, w-u-a-l-m-a-zh-t)". I know we guys are used to British English and pronunciations in US English are a little different. It was funny how much my boss stressed over the pronunciations of Wal-Mart and other such words.

Of course desis are much better, most can speak decent English. But other Asians amaze me. Especially Chinese people, who get most of their basic education in mandarin (that, if they had their childhood in china), not know a bit of English and still survive in Uncle Sam’s land. Earlier, I used to live in a neighborhood called Flushing in New York and that's almost considered a 'mini china town'. Most of the shops and hoardings will be in Chinese and everything ranging from cuisine to lifestyle would be directly or indirectly related to China. Most of my ex-colleagues would even make fun by asking me if I need a Chinese visa to get into the area. Many a time I have been to shops, where if the shop-keeper sees a Non-Chinese enter, he'll immediately wave both his hands and start 'No English No English' in his own funny way. One can do nothing but smile and step out slowly.

For many days, I thought the old lady in the Chinese eat-out near my house was a little crazy. She always muttered something like "habanadha" whenever I left the place. I thought she was scorning at me, till one of my friends found the secret and told me she was actually wishing me by saying "have a nice day". The old lady indeed was not crazy.

Too many non-English speaking people in an English speaking country make the place a little crazy. That too is funny, if looked at with the right perspective.