Good af mik nu

My little nine year old niece uses her dad’s mobile phone and greets me using a whatsApp message “good evening”. That too appended with a few smileys. That gesture really boosts my energy levels, after a tiring day. 

I came across the concept of greeting someone when I reached the fifth standard. Till then in the primary school, teachers didn’t know how to greet or get greeted. Or they simply didn’t care. Our focus was more on things like ten parrots happily singing on a tree branch – quite understandable -too early to learn other complicated, tough things in life. The teacher says that one parrot while singing faints and falls down and asks how many are now left on the tree. We rack our right brain to analyse what would happen to the collapsed singer, whether it would re-join the chorus soon after recovery. At the same time we rack our left brain to analyse how many are still left on the tree unperturbed by the sad fate of their co-singer, still singing happily. How to greet somebody was never there in the agenda.

Things changed. New high school. English was going to be introduced to me for the first time. That anxiety itself kept me away from school for the first three days of the academic year. That resulted in me missing coaching on how to greet in an English way when English teacher entered the class. As the teacher entered, all my yet-to-become friends stood up and shouted something. I also stood up but obviously no words came out of my mouth, as I didn’t know. But I carefully listened to that roar and gathered something “Good af mik nu”. I was thrilled, I learnt something new. Came home and asked my parents “do you know how to greet English teacher when she enters the class? it is good af mik nu” ! They corrected me, “no it is good afternoon, you got it wrong”. I would be the last person to give up so easily even then. “That’s the way in your days, things have changed now” I had to reply. After a few days I knew my mistake and had learnt many more good words in English correctly. Even then, in several later occasions, whenever a topic arose about this English language and me, this good af mik nu episode had been narrated in full detail. The very reason why I still remember this clearly. Needless to say, I started to learn how to greet somebody formally in a hard way.

Shankar was my college mate. Shankar wanted to learn to speak Kannada language. He was from Bengal. He was so good in Bengali language that even his English sounded like Bengali. But due to some reason known to him only, he wanted to pick up some Kannada words. Or he must have heard that Kannada is easy to pick up, as all words in that language have to end with any one of the vowels, a to u. That much consistency is there. Even while adapting words from other languages, those words will be Kannadised like car becomes  caru, turning becomes turningu. That simple.

Shankar approached one of the Kannada speaking guys and enquired as how to greet somebody with a good morning. The friend taught him two words, no doubt both ended in a vowel as required. First one with an “a”and the second word with an “o”. ( I leave it to the wild imagination of those  who know Kannada to guess what those words were). But somehow Shankar had a doubt, he felt those words should not be pronounced by a sane person not in the morning, not even at any other time of the day. He wanted to test it out. He found his tutor friend in the Kannada gang ( these linguistic gangs do exist right?) early next morning. With a broad grin Shankar greeted the tutor with a-ending and o-ending words. What he was taught privately was used publicly on the tutor itself. He could see the embarrassment on the faces of all in the gang. He could make out how bad those words were. Also he managed to get to know the right word consisting of the right consonants and ofcourse the right vowel at the end. He also learnt it in a hard way!

So, learning to greet someone can be hard. One should know how much one can smile, how many times one can shake hands, holding hands at what optimum pressure, how much to bend down, how close to go while hugging, should or shouldn’t kiss on the cheek even if the other party is kissable and so on. While the hard part remains there, the good part is that greeting helps. You may be so happy on that day that you got a salary hike that too in double digits. And you will have all the reason to have a smile and greet your friend coming opposite to you. Your friend still worried about the mosquito bite he had on the previous day noon, still worried about the sleepless night because of the fever he had which didn’t subside till now. He may not smile as broadly as you did, but at least your warm greeting would make him forget for a moment about the highly probable Dengue Virus infection, and the possible trauma he has to go through  by continuously counting his blood platelets, if not counting days.

I just filed my income tax returns yesterday. And you know what, it’s pleasant surprise for me.  It is not only that I managed to file it successfully, there is more to it. I had paid more advance tax than required. So I am expecting a good amount as refund – free money !!! Do I need any other reason this morning to smile heartily and greet you all by saying “Good Morning”?