Thursday, November 02, 2006

golt is my other tongue

as the story goes, my first spoken word was "koochu". nope, i wasnt trying to say koochiekoo to myself like adults who use that with babies assuming that something that sounds funny to them is obviously funny to everyone else. it is not. try explaining a joke. neither is it a mangled version of "couture" which if i'd been the offspring of a french designer and a super model might've been perfectly acceptable. koochu translates to "sit" in mana andhra naadu and in most neighborhoods of chennai. despite its obvious meaning it made my mom jump to attention and take notice. my neighbors then who were from the golt land often took care of me and somehow the rarefied golt air that i breathed while there had found its way into my vocabulary. i kind of lost touch after we moved and while hindi and english would torture me to no end, golt became, as the cliche goes, like hebrew and aramaic to me.

sometime in the late cable tv age, like a radio picking up ceylon signals on a rare night, i began picking up on it again. the signal was much stronger though and emanated from the strong transmitters of gemini and eenadu tvs. i spent a large portion of time on these channels in college and realised that despite the language, all djs were born with really strong neck muscles that enabled them to bob that head a million times a minute. and when the sunday cartoons ended after mowgli went swinging away to "cheddi pehen ke phool kila hai", i'd promptly switch over to whatever was on those channels.

so where is all this going. well it ends up in something i need. i'm one of the biggest tamil fans of golt cinema. i see them whenever i can and really like the music but it is kind hard to appreciate the song without understanding the lyrics. what i need is some information from the large golt population that regularly cause my blog to become unavailable (of course i know of none, so if u r there, pls raise your hand) to point to me some place that translates golt songs into somewhat proper english. actually i'm open to a barter...i'll translate any tamil song you like for a golt song.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Here is your first word. To sit in Goltland is actually Koorcho and not koochu. There goes your first word.

- - B A D H R I - -

catcharun said...

u say toe-may-toe, i say toe-mah-toe..it must've been that tamil accent of mine that made it sound like that. its one of those exotic accents that actually adds to the aural beauty of golt

since u r so much of an expert, what was the most recent golt movie u saw