In my line of work, I get to correspond every now and then with people from quite a few different places around the world, including those in US, France, Germany and Japan. And the wonderful ways in which they twist English around their own languages is sweet, indeed entertaining.

Like a translated document we received from the national postal service in France - La Poste telling us how they want their shipping labels to look - it had a section which contained stuff on the label that was obviously extremely important to them, so much that they named the section "Mandatory Indispensables". They could just as easily have called it "Put this stuff on the label or we'll kill you first. And then misplace the package!". Then there was correspondence from a Frenchman saying "Here are some examples of manifest where we don't have these informations on each page". Love that plurality switching thing.

Which takes me back to those good old days - trying to learn French at IITK. There was this time our class had a little rendezvous with some Frenchmen, and our lecturer, the nicest lecturer in the world, told us to generally be nice by preparing a question each to ask them. And boy was it one of the most pressured moments of my life. I asked one of them an innocent enough question, "Quelle musique aimez-vous ?" (What music do you like?). He had this "Say whaaat?" expression on his face at first. A couple more attempts and an encouraging yet half embarrassed look from the lecturer finally got the message through to the man. And the resultant surge of emotions and torrent of words it evoked from him as he went on into some deep philosophical monologue about what it means to really love music was met by a bewildered grin from my end while I tried desperately to make sense of even a single word if only I could. Not only did I seem totally unFrench to him, I was probably also constipated and retarded in his eyes. "Thanks for keeping me alive through this, Oh God", I prayed silently, "Never again will I smirk at the less Englowed!"

Ah, those wonderful French classes. A time to unwind, to have fun, to take over two minutes to utter a single sentence and still get a pat on the back for it. "Juh sveee umm... Juh mapppppel ... err... Arjun....? Oui...? Oui! Bon!" There were really three foreign language classes - French, German and Japanese. The Germans were students who wanted to learn mainly to pursue higher education. Serious stuff. In uniform it is rumoured. The French consisted of bored housewives, campus residents who wanted to show off to the home crowd, and hopeless romantics. The Japanese were Anime-loving immature man-child desperadoes. While the Japanese often spoke of Hentai and tentacle-sex in class, the meek and conformist French made jokes about how it is inappropriate to ask a young lady questions from the first chapter like "What is your age?". I cannot comment on the Germans since I dared not venture close.

All in all, good times. Times that flash back every now and then in my head when I have serene conversations with fellow travelers. And then I just have to ramble on and on to someone who wouldn't give a smelly escargot for what I have to say.

Well, sometimes there's just no one to talk to. Perhaps if I didn't behave like a wise old monkey who knows the answer to life, the universe and everything automagically following a brief scratch-session, I just might have stopped to listen to other people when they tried to help me however they could. Hmm, if I could just remember what they tried to tell me then...