GENDER FINDERS

Gender Finder – 1: My dad used to always refer to certain fried sweets/snacks as “gender finders” if they turned out to be too hard to bite into and thus if they could be broken with the teeth they had found out the gender of the eater – masculine gender. This was when I was a little kid and had extremely strong teeth till the age of 19-20 at which time, sadly, I had to go in for braces and my teeth lost all their strength. My teeth were indeed the strongest and like little babies who are teething, I always had a craving for something or the other to nibble at. I always chose, hard nuts, hard snacks, flat, puris which didn’t puff up and were discarded by all others in the house, and hard, sagging tandoori rotis which give me great pleasure in the challenge of breaking them apart. With my teeth of course, what elseJ! I still love to nibble but the weakened teeth have reduced the range of hard foods that I can manage to break. In fact, it was because of this nibbling habit of mine that I earned the name of rat/squirrel/monkey in school. Thus, I always used to be considered a boy by my dad because of this and my general tomboyish qualities of playing all the boys’ games along with my two younger brothers. Those two were just a couple of years younger to me so we were pretty close.

Gender Finder – 2: Now unlike my father, I used to do a different kind of gender finding. As we all know, in the English language, there are three clear genders – Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Even in Sanskrit we have 3 genders – Masculine - pulling, Feminine - streeling and Neuter - napunsakling. But in Hindi, our national language, we have just two genders, Masculine and Feminine, which are assigned to all things living and inanimate. When they are living things, it is easy enough to find out the gender, but when it comes to inanimate objects, there is just no logic, rule or any other type of guideline one can follow to identify if the said object is male or female.

I have always thought my grammar to be strong in all the three languages mentioned above, but Hindi gender finding was too tough. My friends used to find my mistakes funny and my teachers used to think my Hindi wasn’t good enough and even suggested I go in for some special coaching. I used to try and ask friends how they identified the gender of a, b, c, and so on, but got know proper answers. Most of them spoke Hindi as it was their mother tongue. If only there were that many inanimate objects in the world as there are alphabets in the English language, then I would have mastered the gender-finder art to perfection. So I started devising other ways by listening to people talk and learn from their conversation whether a book was female or a cup was male and so on. But there again I found, not all the people I spoke to were speaking correct language all the time, just as not all of us can spell words correctly all the time despite being well-educated.

Then I hit upon a brilliant idea which worked for me – Hindi movie names and movie song lyrics. Wow! Wish I had thought of it earlier, I could’ve been spared a lot of embarrassment and tension. But never mind, better late than never! I figured that when the movie producers named their movies or when the song writers did their writing, they would definitely have consulted either a dictionary/thesaurus or at least a Hindi pundit.
So they became my Dictionary/Thesaurus and helped me find genders correctly. Well most of the time! Now, whenever I have to speak in Hindi where correct language matters, I just quickly browse through my mental database of song lyrics and movie names and hit upon the correct gender 99% of the time. I now know that it is meri kahaani (my story), so that makes kahani (story) feminine, tera kasoor (your fault), kasoor (fault) is male and so on.

Gender Finder – 3: Having learnt all this myself, I tried to teach my little school-going daughter some of the ways of identifying gender in Hindi, while explaining to her that English and Sanskrit have 3 genders, but Hindi has only 2 genders. There is no napunsakling in the Hindi language. Naturally she believed me, she believed her school teachers and she believed her text books which reiterated all that I had said.

One day she came running to me on her return from school and said “Mummy, you know what?” I asked “What?” She said, “You were wrong, there IS a napunsakling in Hindi too.” I said “No, there isn’t” and started going over everything once again with her, reminding her that the textbooks or her teachers couldn’t be wrong too. She looked at me thoughtfully for a while, with her cute, innocent but intelligent eyes and said, “Then why did our PT sir, say that the Govt. was behaving like a napunsak about the recent release of terrorists from jail in exchange for hostages?” I was clean bowled and effectively rendered speechless.