Short and Sweet

 Short and sweet sums up the average Bengali pretty well. There are not too many giants here in Calcutta, and given the amount of sweets we consume, it would be a medical anomaly if we were not sweet. Jokes aside, the average Bengali isn't too tall, but definitely intelligent. Another thing which may be useful while detecting a Bengali in a crowd: check for spectacles. If not as a child, then most of us definitely get our spectacles as young teenagers. But enough of generalizations; I'm back home, and it feels great.

Literally. I'm lounging around in a T-shirt and have no worries about getting chilblains or catching a cold. The weather is just amazing when compared to the freezing cold of the hills. The journey was fun and thankfully, uneventful. The only downside, so to speak, was the amount of time we had to wait at the airport. Given the fact that there was nothing to do, the one thing I managed to do during that time was daydream. 

And let me tell you, it's fun. You can make anything happen, and there is no censorship or copyright issue associated with it. I managed to have lunch with Boman Irani and land a deal for a screenplay while I sat at the IGI airport. I was about to get myself invited to an exclusive screening and luncheon (sounds fancier than just 'lunch', doesn't it?) with him and a host of other actors, but as luck would have it, I had a flight to catch. 

Anyways, I slept through the flight and managed to murder my neck in the process, but it was fun otherwise. I was sitting in the middle seat, between a lady who was having quite a heated argument with her mother about a wrong cheque before the flight, and a man who had a Jockey face mask on. I couldn't help but wonder if that mask had been repurposed from some of the other apparel Jockey is known for, but hey, who am I to judge?

At the interminably long wait for our luggage, we saw that most people had put on a minimum of two layers of warm clothing. In Calcutta. Meanwhile, my mother, sister and myself were clad in T-shirts and a cardigan. Suffice to say, Jim Carrey as the Mask would have elicited fewer looks than us if he had decided to walk by baggage claim. 

There's one more thing which Bengali people need to understand. People who do not have inherently English names spell their names, or the names of places, in a certain way, right? What Bengalis manage to do is spell it in a way that includes other English words which, taken at face value in the sentence, will make one split their sides with laughter. Here's an example. 

One of the complexes we passed by on the way home was named as follows: "Dum Dum Heights". The flats were very reasonably priced- only 75 lakhs for a 2 BHK one, with free smoke and noise from the main road thrown into the deal free of charge. For someone who does not know that the 'Dum' will be pronounced like 'aloo dum', the intellect level of the inhabitants of the place is under strict scrutiny. We all know many people who deserve an apartment there for free, thanks to their intelligence, but who's going to point out this linguistic intricacy to the average person? Not me, that's for sure.