Thungo Mogo Juku Juku Opai ;)

I recently read an article in The Hindu saying that India tops the list of countries with maximum number of endangered dialects. This caught my eye for the simple reason that my mother tongue is Saurashtra and I wondered if it was included in that list. Thankfully, after googling I was happy to find out that my language had not been pushed to that state yet.

In the six years I spent in Chennai I had people constantly asking me what language I spoke. It came as no surprise when they gave me a blank reaction when I replied saying it was Saurashtra. Not many people are aware of the existence of such a language given the fact that the only place where there is significant population of Saurashtrians is Madurai.

Like the word 'Sangrail' can be split in two ways to give two different meanings (the meanings can be found in the Da Vinci Code), so can the word be Saurashtra be split in two ways. Split as "Sou"(meaning 100) and "rashtra"(meaning region) it can be understood as the "province of 100 regions". But split as "Saura" ( meaning Sun) and "shtra"(prefix word) it may mean "Worshippers of Sun".

Geographically Saurashtra refers to that part of Gujarat which is a peninsula. The highlighted portion in the picture gives the more accurate description of the region.

It is believed that the Saurashtra speaking people originated from this part of India. This explains the close resemblance the language has with Marathi and Konkani, both Indo-Aryan languages of Western India.

As the region lies on the Arabian Sea, most of the Saurashtrians followed waeving as their occupation. This remains true even now for most Sourashtrians still depend on weaving for their livelyhood.

There is no actual historical evidence as to how or when these people - my ancestors - migrated to the Southern part of India. But it is generally accepted that the Saurashtrian people were forced to leave their homeland due to continuous invasion of their land which led to much suffering and loss. Hence they migrated in large groups to Southern India bringing with them their maginificent skill in weaving. Since then many Saurashtrians have entered other fields and excelled in that(T.M. Soundararajan is a good example).

For a long time I had believed that Saurashtra was only a dialect for I had never seen any writing in that language. But I was proved wrong during a recent visit to a temple in Madurai where I found slokas written in the actual Saurashtra script. Yet sadly the language is not taught in any schools and the script would have been lost but for the magnanimous effort of few Saurashtrians.

Here are a few helpful quotes in Saurashtra that are worth learning...

*Avo - 'Come'

*Thungo mogo juku juku opai - 'I like you very very much' :D

*Thora nav kayo? - 'What is your name?'

*Thora number kayo? - 'What is your number'

*Bharad jayengan ya? - 'Wanna go out?'

*Jaara pisa - Podaa loose

*Tho atho kai paje? - 'What do you want'?

*Thoro kaam seeli jaa - 'Mind your own buisness'

For more translations pls comment and I ll translate em ;)

How Long Can I Go

Well having seen my share of novels and movies in my life, I have, for a very long time wondered just how long a sentence I can write in English without commiting any possible grammatical and semantic mistakes as known to me and hence I have decided to give this a try now here in this blog by stringing together as many clauses as I possibly can (for this sentence is a Complex sentence and not a simple or compound sentence) along with few other adjectives that immediately jump into my mind, which I must say is actually in a relaxed and happy state for I just noticed India win the ODI against Sri Lanka quite comfortably, and I hope that you read this, keeping in mind the fact that if I had used certain swear words like f... this sentence could have been much longer and appreciate this attempt of a fellow human who has tried this only because he is very bored thanks to the fact that he does not have much else to do. :)

P.S : Suggestions on elongating this sentence are most welcome. ;)

The Empty Test Note

I wake up on a Friday with full confusion,
Thanks to all the late night preparations;
My mind is buzzing with stuff from Maths,
I know luck is my only hope to get a pass.

With two test notes I enter the examination hall,
One look at the questions make my heart fall;
The only bright side was I needed only one note,
Later I decide to leave the hall with my mind afloat.

I wake up on the Monday feeling little satisfied,
With decent preparation I was no longer terrified;
Again I entered the hall but now with no tension,
But when I saw the test note I was in confusion.

'Maths' was on 'Subject' column in the test note,
When i realized things my heart so nearly broke;
The events of Friday in my mind soon begin to run,
And if I still had the answer note, then the empty one...

The Road Not Taken

I wrote this during my counseling for getting into college after my 12th. Here it goes.

Two roads diverged in the yellow woods,
One of them led to SSN IT in Chennai,
The other lesser known one to TCE C Sc,
And it was a difficult decision to make.

The road to SSN was today s trend,
Also it meant i can be with my friends;
But high fee no dream job it had,
And it was a difficult decision to make.

Lesser known of the two to me shown,
A path where i had to start alone;
It would be a new adventure for me,
And it was a difficult decision to make.

Finally like tat poet i chose the lesser one,
Since i knew i wud never be alone anywhere;
I don't regret this decision or so i hope,
For it was a difficult decision made.

Note : I wrote this knowing nothing about the two colleges except from what I heard from others. So any attempts in judging them at that time were meaningless.

The Reality Of New Year

As a new year is about to dawn on us and a portion of city is on the streets in the name of "party", I sit here in the tranquility of my house along with my family feeling a mixture of amusement and confusion at this uncanny behavior shown towards the concept of New Year for I cannot quite fathom what a change in the third column of date can quite possibly bring.

Yes I understand what New Year means. Scientifically, it denotes the completion of the Earth's rotation around the Sun (neglecting of course the 1/4th extra distance); teenagically another chance to have great fun with friends; parentically it denotes a sudden increase in the expenditure column and the hopes of better fortune come the new year; grandparentically it means calls from their children; commercially, time to cash in.

Though every New Year is welcomed with a bang, all the party and merriment ends as quickly as it "bang" and finally ceases into a quiet, calm day - just like any other. Come Jan 2nd, we all return to the everyday routine - the same commute, the same job, the same everything. Two consecutive days, two totally different ways of living it. How human.

Of course that's only one view of seeing things. And every coin has two sides to it right?

Every one makes mistakes. It is only human to do so. And we need a fresh start more than once to properly sort things out. New Year is one way of mentally giving ourselves that "fresh start". For doesn't New Year indicate the wonderful beginning of another set of 365 days with a clean slate? It fills people with hope, joy and above all a sense of togetherness.

Jan 1st is the day when we both look back on the past while contemplating the future, all being done in the present. It gives us that all important chance of analyzing what we have done, what we are doing and what we are going to do.

As the fire crackers begin to fly, channels showing people jumping around i come to the end of this year now. And I as I want this to be the last thing I do, I have only one more thing to say.
Cheers, ppl.

The Story As Hero

One fine evening ( I know this sounds like such a cliche, but still...) my friends call me to see some movie called Bommalatam. I hadn't seen much movies lately and as my interests in movies have been steadily falling I had no idea what the movie was about. I actually thought I was going for a Telugu movie or something :)

Ten minutes into the movie i got the feeling that this was no hero-falls-in-love-with-heroine-and-fights-the-villain kinda movie. This surprised me. Cos, for almost a year most of the films have had love as the story's core and I am fed up with them.

I admit the first half was bit confusing but still by no measure boring. It was little hard to keep up with what exactly was going on. And before i knew, it was interval. Another odd thing for a tamil movie for it seemed it was a 1 hr 45 min movie. In that intermission gap i learn the movie was supposed to be a thriller. The first half agreed with that.

Second half is the part where the movie kept me guessing. Having seen few weird english movies, i thought of all kinds of possible story lines. And when the plot was revealed, I admit not in a thousand years could I have guessed it. There is also few other twists that catches the viewers off-guard.

But all this doesn't mean the movie was a perfect one. Far from it. It had it's own share of loop holes and drawbacks. But the story more than makes up for it.

Finally a movie with a superb story. I left the theater with a satisfied feeling. Forty rupees well spent.

Prog - Private Members in Java/C++

Well as we all know private members of a class cannot be accessed directly by objects. We need to use member functions to access them. This is true for all cases. Or so I thought until I encountered few cases where this ain't true.

For the first, one thing has to be understood. Memory for the member variables are arranged in a sequential manner. So by performing arithmetic calculations on the address of the public variables we can get the address of the private members and hence access them.

Second. I found this when i was looking at copy constructors. A sample copy constructor would look something like this.

class sample
{
private : int i,j;
public:
sample(sample A)
{
i=A.i;
j=A.j;
}
...
...
};

Here the object A seems to access it s private members without calling any of it's own member functions(the constructor it is present is not called by that object). Now look at the following code.

class sample
{
private: int i,j;
public:
void well( )
{
sample test;
test.i = 5; //test accessing it s private members without
test.j = 10; // use of any objects
}
...
...
}

So the point is an object created inside a member function of the same class can access the private members directly. Note that the member function should be from the same class. For eg if the well( ) func had been in another class it would show error that object trying to access private members.

There is of course another, much simpler way of accessing these private members. By simply changing the "private" keyword to "public" keyword :)

Note : The above logics are applicable in both C++ and Java.