I see you

I’ll start with an earnest confession that the title of blog has no link whatsoever in the text that follows.
The reference is from the movie ‘Avatar’ where Navi’s of pandora were seen to be using this phrase to greet each other. Interestingly, the same sentence was trusted for verbal expression for sentiments of all kinds. Be it saying hello to your dad or while proposing to your love interest!
Humans are more complicated. We need appropriate stream of words for every occasion.
And, at times, the language barrier increases this manifold. As Indians, we bump into such situation without crossing international borders.

Some alteration of words here and there and you might run into prospect of losing the actual plot.
e.g. A genuine hindi sentence ‘Ram swaroop ne chori ki , falswaroop Jail gaye’ would sound meaningful to only those who understand ‘falswaroop’ means ‘as a result of’.
X-box generation would question back if Ram swaroop did the theft how come Falswaroop had go to jail :)

To substantiate my point further, I‘ll include the below excerpt from my one-day-to-be-published biography :)


This happened when I was in high school (1996). We lived around Assam-Meghalya border near Shillong. I used to go for mathematics tuitions to our teacher’s house every evening. One day, my teacher had gone out of station unplanned and thus the tuition had to be cancelled for the day.
‘Aap baitho , sa kha ke jao ..‘ (Naga version of what should have been ‘Aap baitho , chai peekar jana)
His wife asked us to stay for tea.

They were a Naga family settled in Meghalya.

Like everyone of us who is not from north east, I was amazed to see that their first language was Hindi!. The fact that they looked so much similar but still don’t speak same language and had to converse in Hindi was close to unbelievable.

In some moment , she came back and served Tea. She had also brought a bowl full of some ethnic snack alongwith. I had no clue of what it was, and felt awkward to ask for the ingredients.
Perhaps she read my mind.
Her sweet reply was something I would first write in Hindi so that you could appreciate the crux of the theory that I was trying to build in first few lines of the blog.
“Beta sharm-laaj na karo , kutte ka bachcha pakaya hai , taste karo”

Actual version :
“sharam bhi nahi hai , laaj bhi nahi hai … khao kutta ka bachcha khao … “

I don’t remember how did I managed to sip Tea and gracefully gesture good bye that day.

Note : This is a migrated post from