Hey, both of you three, fall in line here!
Stand-up comedian Kapil Sharma’s USP of being a person with limited communication skills in English has helped him a great deal. Being not so proficient in the Queen’s language, has its own share of hilarious situations.
We were three officers at the training academy when the outdoor instructor beckoned us, almost yelling on the parade ground: “Hey, both of you three, fall in line here!”
Once, a colleague, who was a postgraduate in Hindi, asked me to accompany him to his boss. My friend needed to clarify a point. “But you can go and talk to him,” I said. “Well, you can speak fluent English and my boss is convinced if anything is said in English,” he said.
I recall an instance when my uncle, who retired from the army in the ’60s, asked his son to go to a certain officer to make a call to a relative. He instructed him, “Ask his permission before using the phone saying, ‘May I use your telephone’? He’ll say ‘yes’ and only after that dial the number.” When the boy approached the officer and asked, ‘May I use your telephone,’ the officer frowned and just said, “Nope!” The poor fellow was tonguetied as he hadn’t been told how to proceed in such a scenario.
The impression that a person who knows English possesses a superior quality still holds good in our social interactions. I remember actor Manoj Kumar saying an unexpected, “Mention not” to Asha Parekh’s “Thank you,” in the movie Upkar. It was taken as the hero’s being no less educated. In the movie Guide, Dev Anand bullies Sanskrit-speaking pandas (priests) and wins applause from the movie watchers.
I remember a keen English enthusiast, Surya Prakash, introducing himself to the interview board as ‘Sun Light’! An old man in my village, who had seen the British era, once asked another yokel, “If you tell me the meaning of ‘to’, I will take you to be the best English-knowing person around!”
When my grandson visited us from the US last year, he was fond of only of the attendants at home. That’s because he would do his bidding and say, “Yes, yes, yes!” It’s another matter that the attendant knew only how to say yes, while everyone else would also say, “No, Armaan, no” when the boy tried being what a two-year-old is supposed to be like.
A Sikh gentleman who visited England informed everyone around that the English “are so modern and intelligent that ohna de te nyaanay vi angrezi bolde nen (Even their children speak English)!”
My younger sister, Rekha, was at the receiving end in the family for not knowing enough English. She opted out of studies after doing matriculation. Recently, she was in Istanbul to attend a destination wedding. There arose some issue in her visa at the immigration check. When questions were put to her, she answered in broken English. Back home, she boasted, “Look, no one else there knew even as much English as I did.”
A SIKH GENTLEMAN WHO VISITED ENGLAND INFORMED EVERYONE AROUND THAT THE ENGLISH “ARE SO MODERN AND INTELLIGENT THAT OHNA DE TE NYAANAY VI ANGREZI BOLDE NEN (EVEN THEIR CHILDREN SPEAK ENGLISH THERE)!”