Lost in Translation

Translations are a dicey business. You never know what can happen when something is taken literally without using the 'little grey cells' inside all those millions of heads. Over the past few days I've noticed a few examples but one stands out unequivocally. A few days ago, I had finally decided to eat at my college cafeteria, albeit only for breakfast. The humble idli was my choice and just as I was about to take my plate away to enjoy my first experience of cafeteria food, the server asks me, "Saar, do you want gunpowder?" My mind went blank as I just stared at his face for a few minutes. For those of you who do not know, I study in an institution where even the mere mention of war elicits a visit to the closest Father for a 'serious talk'. And since when have explosives been a side-dish for breakfast, except for Wiley .E. Coyote?? But I was in an adventurous mood that day so I just nodded expecting a load of black powder to be dumped on my plate and maybe even a complementary gun to boot. What I didn't expect was a coarse, brown pile of powder with enough oil to stop your heart just being slopped on to my plate. It was then I realise that 'gunpowder' was actually chutney powder. Now, who's brilliant idea was it to go call something so simple a weapon of mass destruction? It isn't even that spicy, for God's sake!! Then there's jaggery. Alright, I admit this story could just be me being the absent-minded boy I am, but it does illustrate how translation can deny people of really nice things. When I was 6, I had just found out about jaggery and wasn't too familiar with English. So I went and asked my grandmom what jaggery was in English. My grandmom was slightly confused how to explain how jaggery and molasses are related, so she just told me something in Tamil that translated to 'brown sugar'. Now, I blame the next part on TV. During this time, my family and I watched this serial where this little boy was drugged using 'brown sugar', the drug. Unfortunately, to my infantile mind, I understood this as jaggery and since then feared the sticky sweet till I was 16,  when I finally realised that jaggery and brown sugar just aren't the same. I had wasted 10 years, a whole decade of my life running away from jaggery, all because of my grandmom's inability to explain its meaning. (P.S. I don't blame her at all) Of course this is coming from the kid who wrote 'My father in a wood-cutter' when asked to make a sentence with the word 'wood-cutter'. I still argue that that was a brilliant sentence and really does make sense, despite what my parents say. But that was a long time ago. All I'll end in saying is, be careful what you translate, you don't want your hands to go pluck mangoes!! (I'll leave you to figure out where I got that from. If you're a Malayali, directly translate it into Malayalam. If you're not.......get someone to do it for you! ;)

Çiao!