How Do You Say "Help! I'm Being Eaten by a Tiger" in Hindi?

I'm slowly checking things off of my To Do list before we leave in ten days. India, here we come!

I feel rather sheepish--once we finally decided to take this trip I got the "How to Speak Hindi" bug where I was determined to wow the locals with my impressive vocabulary. I got a few phrases and words down and made Andrew smile with my comic attempts to say important things like "My tongue is pink" and "Why do you have my library book?" but then I stumbled upon some key information.

Apparently they do not speak Hindi where I'm going.

So much for my "Bharat ek adbhut desh hai." In fact, it's worse than that. In Tamil Nadu I read that it is offensive to even attempt Hindi because of the way Delhi has pushed the language on them. So don't even try it, just keep on walking. Don't even turn around.

Great, just great. Back to the drawing board. So what language do they speak you ask? Well that's a bit more complicated. In fact, India has more dialects than people (I've heard) so pinning down exactly what language to speak can be difficult. There are 29 states in the world's largest democracy and we'll be going to Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Anna Pradesh (at least that's the count so far, it could vary) and in Karnataka they speak Kannada (not to be confused with Canadian--that I can speak. As in "Are you bringing extra beer to the hockey game, eh?") in Tamil Nadu they speak Tamil and in Anna Pradesh they speak Telagu.

The only language anyone speaks with any consistency is, in fact, English. My parents know couples where the wife may speak Telagu, the husband may speak Kannada and neither understands the other's native language so they talk in English which is the second language of both. And it's not as if these are languages that resemble each other. The script and the words are all different, though there are some words that can be similar, just as you'd see in Italian and Spanish or something.

For example . . .

Hello in Hindi? Namaste
Hello in Kannada? Namaskara
Hello in Tamil? Vanakam
Hello in Telagu? Namaskaram (the formal version)

So maybe I'll just practice my vacant American stare and goofy smile for when people speak to me, though I am determined to at least have a couple words in each language down by the time we get there. What else are 23 hours of flight time good for anyway?

I'm planning on writing about every step of the trip, I'm sure you'll get completely tired of me by the time I'm done but as a preview I'll tell you a few of our plans. I got a note that Mom and Dad made reservations at the Cicada Resort on the Kabini River where we'll be on safari. My parents were there this past year and had a great time so they're taking us back with them. We'll be going to Ooty--which is just like "booty" only with less B--to see the tea plantations (picture at top). It is actually called Udagamandalan so I can see why they shortened it to Ooty. People were passing out from lack of oxygen by the time they finished saying it.

Also Chennai (formerly Maddras) which is pronounced She-NI and is the capital of Tamil Nadu. On the way there we'll be stopping by Sampath's village. Who is Sampath? Well Sam-pot (if you're looking for help pronouncing that) is my parents' driver who has practically become one of the family. No really, I think the last report on the status of their wills said "Nichols kids out, Sampath in." Or something like that.

Anyway, they love him and he drives them everywhere on their adventures but they've never been to his village. They've planned to visit it especially while we're there so we can see it and meet his family too and according to them it is an actual village--two, maybe three hundred people--so I'm going to get quite the spectrum of Indian life from raging metropolis to country hamlet.

Of course I'll be all over Bangalore, the capital of Karnataka (and home to Aishwarya Rai whom you see here). Actually I don't know if she lives there still, but that's where she's from--Karnataka. I mention her because I loved Bride and Prejudice and that's pretty much my only introduction to Bollywood. Obviously my education has been lacking. Those eyes are completely amazing. How far would I go in life with eyes like that I ask?

We'll be in Pondicherry, a former French colony and renowned for its colonial architecture and culture, and Mamallapuram (also called Mahabalipuram), known for its temples, and Hyderabad (capital of Anna Pradesh) with its Golkonda Fort and over to to Mysore for the Mysore Palace (which you see at left here) and . . . all sorts of places in between. I cannot wait.

And monkeys . . . there will be monkeys. Oh yes, I can assure you. Lots of monkeys.

You won't want to miss it.

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