“Whose father’s what goes?”

Wishing the readers a very Happy Holi with some songs of brazenness

Rang barseOnce a casual acquaintance, but who had a way of showing great familiarity, visited me. He started discussing something very animatedly, every second sentence he would look at me intently and ask, “Whose father’s what goes? Isn’t it?” I didn’t know what to say, because I had never heard this expression before, nor did it make any sense to me grammatically, until I had a flash. If you are still puzzled, try to translate it into Hindi. Of course, he meant: किसी के बाप का क्या जाता है?, or KKBKKJH. There are times when nothing but WFWG can convey what you want to say.

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Ode to the Great Indian Family

Wishing a very Happy Holi to everyone

Great Indian FamilyHoli was the time when one went to one’s ‘native’ place – everyone belonged to a place where he came from. In the olden days, going to the native place might involve using multimodal transport – by train to the nearest railhead, from there by bus, and the last mile by tonga, bullock cart, tractor-trailer or foot. ‘Native’ places are disappearing fast. We might have a job or be located somewhere, but we do not belong to any place.

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Songs of Holi

Wishing Happy Holi to all

HoliThis is the fifth year of Songs of Yore, and I have not yet done a post on Holi songs. Every time Holi came, I thought everyone would be doing a list of Holi songs, and my doing one would be trivial, and may contain overlapping songs. Along the way, I strayed into writing ‘serious’ articles on Holi, culminating in a review of ‘Sangam’ last year.

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