FUN IN INDIAN ENGLISH

28^th July, 2009.

Through the recent years, a lot of Indians are opting to speak English language as often as possible. The reasons being many, may it be for obtaining a good job, may it be for pursuing higher studies etc. What ever the reason may be, we have to agree the fact that in this contemporary world, good language skills are of utmost importance.

Albeit, at times we manage to speak in English, that too with averring fluency, we are incognizant of the blunders we make while speaking so called Indian English. There is a famous peculiar message circulating among the mobiles across India, stating that “British destroyed our country for 150 years, so let us destroy their language forever”. Very truly said. Only exception being that there is no need of ‘let us’ in the message, for knowingly or unknowingly we have always made fun out of the language. This I felt because of the few examples which were cited in my CAT class today. Few of them I would like to discuss below.

Firstly our mother tongue has a great deal of effect on the English language we speak. For instance once a person approached my sir and advised him, “Be careful with his spoonerism”. My sir, then baffled, asked him what he meant by spoonerism. He then replied in Hindi ,“chamchagiri” sir. How funny, right. Actually the word spoonerism has got some other meaning in English, which means slip of the tongue. For example, if we speak ‘down trained’ instead of ‘town drained’, this slip of tongue is called as spoonerism. Further few more such sentences to make you interested: “I am talking to him, why are you coming center center or middle middle(beech beech main)”. “He went to the village to sell his property along with his wife”. Read this sentence carefully, you will find something irresistible to laugh at. Keep going.

Secondly, we tend to frame our own words with the limited knowledge we have. And moreover we use them with such confidence as if it is a general word. K, let me ask you a question, rather simple one. What is the opposite of postpone? 99% of the Indians will answer it within a second as prepone. But in reality, atleast until 1998, there is no word called prepone. It is in the new oxford dictionary in 1998, the word was included, but with a note i.e, (from india). So must be feeling proud of being an Indian now, but in contrast to this, we use many other words that do not exist.

A few more instances to perplex you. “Walking on the road, a stone fell on me”. Most of us infer from this sentence that you were walking on the road and the stone fell on you. But actually it means that the stone is walking on the road and it fell on you. “Having gone to the market, all vegetables were bought by my father”. Now you can understand, who actually went to the market.

Here finally to make you involved, I post to you a few questions. Please do answer to find out the funny side of it. “The river is flowing _____ the bridge”, “ I am sitting _____ the shade”. Hope you had fun reading this post, and wish to see your replies in the comments section. Thanks for sparing such time. Have a good day.

Interview calls for MBA

13^th July, 2009.

Today I received two letters asking me to attend interviews for admission into MBA courses. While one was from the National School of Business(NSB), Bangalore, the other was from International School of Business and Research (ISBR), Bangalore. They were sent to me based on my ICET score. Looking at them, my first reaction was of complete surprise and I was left spellbound.

Reading the first letter, i.e from NSB, I found few notable points. Most important of them was that the course was not completely from NSB. Certification will be given by Sikkim-Manipal University or the Bharatiyar University along with the MBA-Plus certification from NSB. Also I will not be able to attend the interview because the interview is on 14^th July, the day after receiving this letter. The deadline for confirming was over then.

Coming to ISBR, though the date of interview is on 18^th of july, I don’t want to deviate from my dream of making it to IIM’s or atleast giving my cent percent in preparing for CAT. For, anyway I will be writing MAT through which I can get back to these b-schools if necessary. So wish I am making the right decision in ignoring these calls.

My first post

9th july,2009.

This being my first post on the blog, it gives me an immense amount of pleasure writing this. Though it took some time to come on to the page, hope that it will make a long stand. To summarize myself to those who don’t know, i am preparing for CAT 2009, and as a part of it i am acquiring coaching from T.I.M.E. institute, secunderabad. I have been through a lot of dilemma as to what to choose after engineering, but then found that CAT would be an appropriate choice. The rank i got in ICET also helping in this cause. For the first time CAT is being conducted online for the year 2009, making it look even tougher. The CAT exam is expected to be much like the GRE format, except that in the former we can navigate between any questions or sections, which is not the case in the latter. Further, in comparison to GRE, the standard of questions that appear in CAT is much much higher.

In order to acquaint us with the online format, the institute is conducting as many as seven online mock tests across the country. The first of which i have attended yesterday. And as expected no miracles were to happen, and i took as much as ten minutes time to try the first question in Quant’s section. The worst part of it being that i still couldn’t get the answer for it. Then i left that question, eased my nerves and hoped for an easy question to follow. As i went further, to my delight i was able to solve a few questions. Then came the Logical Reasoning section, and in this as well i managed to answer few questions. By the time i completed these two sections, only half an hour of time was left and the last section was that of daunting Verbal Ability. I then slowly but carefully started reading the questions and managed to guess four or five answers, but then got struck in a question with the time reading 4 minutes remaining. I was so involved in the question that i was taken aback to see the time out button even before attempting that question. I was left wondering as how soon the time passed by.

In all it was a nice experience on how to face the exam and will try hard to improve myself and perform better in the coming mocks. Well this is it for the first time, will return back soon with more stuff. Thanks for reading. Keep visiting. Have a nice day.