Tuesday, December 27, 2005

The Master of Fundas

Funda - Short form of Fundamental. A slang form used to denote any concept or fact stated to explain things / phenomena wherein not many people are really interested in the explanation.
That's what I use the word Funda for and I guess a lot of Indians (read Engineering graduates from India) use it in a similar way. e.g Professer Kulkarni gives a lot of Fundas.

With the Funda of "Funda" explained , I shall continue this post. I am about to describe one roommate of mine who was extremely good at belching out Fundas. This guy is a hard core gujrati and a MBA grad. When I joined my first big job in Bangalore , we happened to share apartment along with a few more guys. A lot of people joined with me and he was one of them. Amongst us he was relatively older and more experienced as well as with virtue of a post grad also among the more educated people on the job.

He talked about anything and everything in the world with a lot of authority. Naturally when he talked rest of us listened. I guess it was more out of repect for his seniority then anything else.
He had a "funda" about everything. Whether it was the way one should drink lot of alchohol without getting drunk or why we should have a well set up kitchen instead of eating outside.
Although on careful thought and practical experience I ended up agreeing with a lot of his fundas (at least the alchohol thing seems to work) I thought it was funny the way delivered the fundas.
I mentioned this guy being a hardcore gujrati (born and brought up in Gujrat). He thus had a highly gujrati accented hindi and english.

Before him the only gujrati speaking people I knew were from Bombay who didn't have much of an accent. However with our Fundamaster I had to work hard to understand what he said and what he meant.. Boss was pronounced like Bose, Gas was pronounced more like guess and the list continues.. His Fundas weren't very effective as we mostly nodded our head in agreement even though we wouldn't have understood half of what he said. We just wanted to lure him into thinking that he convinced us so that he would stop coming up with more Fundas.

Soon I figured out the key to his pronounciation ... he found it difficult to make some sounds and the altenate expressions changed the whole meaning of the word he was speaking. With the Key discovered I figured a few more words and their alternate accented expressions. I explained this key to the rest of my roommates. The idea was to help them understand what he said in the first go instead of blindly nodding the head. But corrupted as we are the explanation took a complete U turn. Instead of appreciating what he said we discovered alternate expressions for a lot of new words (some he hadn't used since sharing apartment with us). Soon we had a whole parody of a a popular hindi song written with some of his most used words.

Although I respected him for knowledge and maturity and often talked to him about a variety of things , I always remember him for his accented Hindi. It was afterall, behind his back, a free source of entertainment for me and one of my other roommates for a long time. I remember the time when Mr Funda used to sit in the living room watching news (gaining more information for future Fundas) we used to sit in the other room quitely singing the song.

All said and done, Mr Funda did have a lot of confidence and was quite mature. He has been a man close to his family and as the elder brother,he did pick up the responsibility for rest of his siblings very early. Some health problems in his family meant that he had to leave a good job and perhaps a rewarding career in favour of staying close to his family. He was the first to shift out of our place in Bangalore which soon gave me the position of Master of Fundas (not that I can match him but I try). However I shall always revere him as "The Master of Fundas"

1 comment:

  1. Congo's Sandy! Pretty well written and humorous. And me being a part of this apartment at bangalore, means i know who is the "Funda Man". Hehehe

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