Being a Hindi fan in South India can be challenging. Thankfully, my lovely state does not stone me like what happens allegedly in some other South Indian states. But they do not throw roses, either. They are quite indifferent, I must say. Due to my father’s frequent transfers as a central government employee, I spent a major chunk of my childhood in Northern and Western India. In my fourth standard, I reached Ahmedabad and discovered that the Hindi texts were what I had previously read in my first standard in Dehradun. This springboard was useful throughout my school and high school years.
Teachers saw me as a golden and glaring example of a South Indian who did so well in Hindi. The initial tremendous advantage certainly helped. In the final rankings, my Hindi marks were sometimes responsible for a great total, putting me ahead of many of those illustrious, super-brainy Gujjubhais and South Indians. The brainy Madrasis (a unified term for all South Indians before NT Rama Rao burst on the national scene and gave the Telugus a separate identity) with their large heads, long hair, and runny noses just shook their heads in disbelief with their science, math, and English marks higher than mine. The final Hindi lap saw me emerge victorious a few times, while they sadly went back to their private Hindi lessons, struggling with grammar, word-splitting, types of words, and essays (long and short), I laughed all the way to the award stage to receive my certificates.
Anyway, I came to settle in Telangana, where a healthy mix of Hindi, Urdu, and Telugu flourishes, or so I thought, because my walking friends are an exception. One might expect me to have settled into a comfortable life, but one can trust the human mind to always be stirring trouble. I love Hindi songs and poetry, and a step beyond that, I am also an amateur poet, and a passionate one at that. I began composing these lengthy and profound (or so I believed) poems, which I then freely distributed to my friends and family members. My dedicated walking friends were my first audience, and they stood in dumb silence and shocked incomprehension as I recited my poems to them initially. It was certainly unsettling. They asked me to translate the poems into Telugu.
That is certainly the best way to put off a budding poet. The lyrical twists and turns, as well as the deeper meanings, are, most of the time, extremely difficult to translate on an impromptu basis. This made reciting poetry to my limited audience so much less fun. They repeatedly requested, nay demanded, to shorten the poems, and finally, after repeated attempts, I managed to reduce them to four-liners for their consumption. I could not make my deep and profound (have I told you this before) thoughts any shorter, like an equational e=mc2 or an aphoristic “Aham Brahmasmi.” The four-liners were the absolute final compromise. I believed I was doing a great job of expressing great ideas in just four lines, but the incomprehension, the dumb silence, the constant demand for translations of every single word and line, and the tepid claps are not at all comforting. My walking mates would give their lives for me, I tend to believe, but they have now drawn a line at my poetry.
My dear wife tells me that she notices a certain glaze and gleam in my eyes when I finish my latest poem, and that becomes a signal for my daughter and herself to hide under the bed, slink into the remotest corners, or hurry themselves with the most non-existent of work. The excuses continued to grow increasingly bizarre, such as when my daughter left to feed the starving dog or when my wife had to fix the broken clock. We don’t even own a dog, so finally I got the message, and with a bit of anger and a bit of sadness, I dropped them as my target audience. Through thick and thin, my otherwise wonderful wife had promised while going around the fire. Always there for you, my daughter had said. While my dear, late mother was a wonderful listener — she would often begin her praises before I had finished the poem. Pure maternal love was good for individual confidence but did not help in the big picture.
A final ray of hope emanated from my North Indian Hindi-speaking friends whom I tried to communicate with through the phone. A few of them were poets themselves. Some of them were polite, but most were brutal. Now, one thing that I was not particularly taught and rarely followed was the gender of many words in Hindi. Apparently, the gender of words plays a significant role in Hindi, and for a purist, writing Hindi poetry without confirming the genders would be equivalent to eating a dosa with jam or a pizza with sambar. Absolute sacrilege, they said.
One kind North Indian lady instructed me to either hang all the critics from the tallest tree or toss them into the ocean after tying a heavy stone to their legs. Well, she had married a South Indian after facing resistance from her family, which may have significantly influenced her views on Hindi grammar. She said we live in a liberal age where gender is the most fluid thing — given that humans can manifest themselves in as many as fifty different genders, it is acceptable for words to encompass two or three genders. Her words, comforting and extremely convenient, rekindled my efforts at Hindi poetry just as I was giving up. Thus, I don’t worry about the gender of the Hindi words these days, but then, I have hardly any audience left to recite my poetry to.
