Probashi Bong Pseudo Intellectuals

Here’s what a visit to a typical Bong household during your vacations will encounter:

Before you enter the house, take off your shoes: they are dirty; how can a decent Bengali enter a house without taking off the shoes? Now this entire hunky dory is fine from the point of view of hygiene, but when the room you walk into with bare feet is screaming with sand, broken biscuit crumbs from those cha sessions, achar from when chotka was watching the TV while eating, you wish you could scream bloody murder. So as you somehow squirm your feet and make your way in, you got to start with pronam(read as touching the feet of anyone even an hour old making yourself as parallel to the ground as you can: the more prostate the more bhalo chele you are). When you are finally done with your time at the lower reaches of the room, you get to sit. So you are on holiday…the regulars….kemon lagche? Kobe jachcho(How are you liking the college? When are you returning?) If this happens to be your second visit during the same hols..questions vary to… khuub lamba chutti. Bhalo tomader onek aaram. Khokar to khali ek mash chilo. (You’ve got really long hols. Good. You guys have it easy. Khoka gets only a month off). Of course the fact that Khoka comes home only 5 times a year is another issue all together. Visit to an exceptionally conservative family might also involve comments like: Oh Tshirt aar half pant porecho?(with a lot of disgust)..Chule gel lagiyecho? (This generation is going to the dogs). Sunechi okhane khub drinking hoye?(I have heard there’s a lot of boozing that takes place there). My reply: No Idea(fingers crossed even as my sister raises an eyebrow)

With the preliminaries out of the way, the bong-favourite cha is here with a few snacks. The aunty walks in sweaty from her toil in the kitchen, tucks her pallu in and plonks down on the mora. She calls her pretty daughter (read Nilanjana’s post on the bong girl) in. Talk of music begins. Rabindra Sangeet is amazing. How one poet can write so many amazing songs is a wonder. Everything else is disregarded as baje. So my being an amateur rock vocalist receives a few nose twitches and dirty ‘baje chele’ looks. Then the daughter who is invariably trained in classical music is asked to sing a song. The unchanging replies, in order of frequency of occurrence:

1. Ami beshi bhalo gete pari na (I can’t sing too well)
2. Aaj gola boshe aache (Literally translated means my throat has sat down today)
3. Bhalo gaan mone porchena(Can’t remember a good song)

Nevertheless, she has to sing a song, which is almost always pretty good and receives a load of praises. I manage to receive a few reprimanding glances for being immersed in Autocar all this time and failing to clap at the wail of a Rabindra Sangeet that I have doubtlessly heard over a million times before. The conversation shifts towards studies. It starts with my sister. Aaha ki lokhi meye….genius. koto kore chilo GRE te? 1597…USA kemon lagche? Uh oh trouble. Time for me to scoot before my CG comes up to scrutiny. Fortunately Chotka can’t figure out why his computer isn’t starting. So I have to hurry away. The engineer’s in the house. I manage to escape the rest of the conversation which unfailingly circumscribes the following:

1. The prices of Hilsa in the market.
2. The prices of other perishables
3. Why Sonia Gandhi is such a manipulative lady
4. Why Mamata Banerjee behaves in such an uncivilized way
5. Bacchara bokhe jachche keno? (Why today’s kids are getting spoilt?)
6. Why Greg Chappel is such a devil
7. Sourav Ganguly and his many failures
8. Sourav Ganguly: The Saviour of Bengalis

By the time I fix the computer, it’s time to push. Goodbye’s and best of lucks are showered and the visit is over….whew!!

P.S: If sorry for the constantly changing template on this blog. Had to do some experimenting before I could actually learn enough html and Google API to tweak this one. If you know how to change the name of the author from Blog owner to Author in the Post page(the one that comes up when you click the post title), please mail me at anurag.dutta1@gmail.com

Labels: visit

very well written post dude..loks like Team Bong is gathering steam  


bacchara bokhe jachhe keno...lol seriously, that's the one thing our parents' generation is obsessed with!  


did u go 2 get married or sumthin?? d post looks rite out f d 80s movies...well tho u paint d picture pretty well i beg to differ...dis is not d avg bong household...but thn wat do i know...hav nevr livd in cal for more than a month n a half evr... :)  


hmm... cant help but agree with saikat. as far as i know, this is not the average bengali household. but then, poeple like this do exist!

and gre scores are in multiples of 10!

nice read!  


@saurya: Thnx man
@Nilanjana: yup, god knows how many times i have heard that line
@saikat: no man. dpn't scare me like that. and ya, it is sort of exaggerated but the post was inspired by one extremely 80's-type family
@sap: thnks on the GRE info. Somehow had heard the wrong score from my sis. correction: 1590  


well, primarily, you might ask me, why read this blog at all? true! but now that i have read it, my comments:

what you say does not definitely represent an average bengali household. but, since you are so desperate to unveil the abominable bengali, give it some more thought. may be people will get to realize that you are talking of nothing else but your own family.

and yes, nilanjana dear! my dad is a bengali brahmin. i can just not recollect any of your traumatic childhood experiences. and, i do know a whole lot of bengali brahmin girls who have had a healthier childhood than yours. so, maybe, you could spare your parents a bit of thought, and not let your upbringing get maligned on the web in this way. i know you are a kid. BITS will try to help you grow up.

i know it's none of my business, but i am a typical bengali, and philanthropy is a sort of a hobby for me!

see you later!  


Post a Comment