When I was little, I never saw The Jungle Book. I don't know why. I lived for Disney.
Anyway, I'm having a Jungle Book renaissance. I want to watch it. I want to read it. I realize I'm a little all-India-all-the-time lately, but I have a lot to learn and it's hard to immerse in Ye Olde Amrika. I want to go to the bazaars and drink chai and see the elephants! I want to hear Hindi enough that I can speak it with something of a natural flow. So, here in Amrika, I'm turning to The Jungle Book.
Here's something cute:
English: bear; Hindi: bhaalu (भालू)
English: panther/leopard; Hindi: bagheera (बघीरा)
English: elephant; Hindi: haathi (हाथी)
You get the idea. I'm not certain about the spellings... but now you know your Hindi jungle animals (add bandar [pronon. "bundahr"] for "monkey" and you're set)!
Yes; I go to great lengths to convince myself I'm studying while not studying.
And tonight is better than last night. I'm drinking tea and finished with today's essay/Hindi quiz/Bio midterm trio. The constant barrage of essays and midterms I've been encountering lately have left me feeling a bit withered; last night I was basically prepared to shoot myself in the face. But still, with everything I have to do over the next 4 weeks, I'm most uncomfortable about the prospect of doing a skit in Hindi in front of my class. I have 3 other partners, so isn't as if I'm alone; still, the idea of memorizing and then delivering 3 minutes worth of lines in a foreign language while also attempting to act makes me want to crawl inside a shell.
Shiver.
Course registration started today and the classes I'm looking at for next quarter are a little on the awesome side--I'll update on those when they're set, though.
I have more besides work on my brain, but I haven't got the organizational skills nor guilt-free time to make it materialize in wordform. So you get to learn Hindi.
मैं जैसे आप होना चाहती हूँ ।
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2 comments:
Ugh, we had to do a 5 minute Hindi skit too. Hate hate hated it. There was a guy straight from Mumbai in our group, yet he apparently refused to attend our skit-writing meetings, so my other partner and I (a fellow Amurrkan (though she was half Punjabi AND we randomly shared the same last name with a bastardized spelling!)) wrote the skit ourselves. When we completed, the fluent Hindi speaker jumped in at the end and crushed every grammatical error with such annoyance about our ignorance. Hindi intimidated me so much. Everyone was already a godddamn fluent speaker or at least partially so.
I want my India kick to be back. :[
Yesss, commiseration!
About half my class is Indian, almost every else has been to India, and one dude has an Indian girlfriend. I feel a little disadvantaged sometimes.
And my inability to understand it spoken fluently, where everyone else can, is really frustrating.
You should try to go! Apply to an environmental program there... there are seriously a bazillion. And then make the gov't pay for it.
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