Remembering Mr Bose

A song from a new movie-Delhi Belly has been occupying continuous bandwidth-be it FM or television. The producers of the album claim it to be the next youth anthem. On a closer look or shall i say hearing, i heard that phrase wrapped in a punk rockish music. Bhaag DK Bose..bhaag.

This immediately set me back to seventh standard. Being a convent school run by the strict disciplinarians-The Brothers as they liked to be called, we the students were not allowed to utter an iota of expletives. But as the old adage goes-you can take out the boy from the country but cannot take out the country from the boy-so were we so much influenced by the society around us, it was impossible not to have an urge to bring out the unspoken from the mouth. But in school, any swearing was treated like blasphemy in the dark ages-if the teachers or brothers came to knew about it you would be made to face the Khandwa friend-which was akin to burning on stake of the dark ages. And no matter how hard you tried to be conspicuous you would get snitched. But as they say necessary is the mother of invention so we did develop some unique phrases to bring out what was forbidden. This particular expletive we are taking about, referred to female genitalia and was on a common usage. On reversing the expletive it became a common bengali name DK Bose.So the guys who at best could say idiot and stupid and same to you inside the school walls now would say- Shut up you DK Bose or Whats up DK Bose. This started a revolution of sorts and people came up with more innovative phrases to disguise the expletives. These are few of them that i can recollect now:

Jha saab Tu Saab-Disguised as calling someone with respect this actually referred to pubic hair. Other variations of this included jhandu balm and jhand muraina.

Kaun dam de raha hai- Although translated from Hindi this would mean who is threatening you but a closer look will reveal this referred to condom.

You cant do-although plain looking this referred to sodomy.

BC-A historical distortion of Before Christ to refer to someones sister.

As we learnt biology we came up with a peculiar way to pronounce Mitochondria that sounded like an expletive referring to someones mother.

Then as information technology took over we hashed Mother board to sound like the worst of expletives.

So when i heard this new youth anthem i figured this is not new after all. My generation has already grown up on it. If this is the measure of the creative ability of our movie industry, i must say we were more creative than this in seventh standard. Back then we thought this was all useless stuff but it seems people are minting money out of it. There are so many more creative things we did but now we have no track of it in our memory. If only we could have documented them...

A last word of caution to Prem-Going by what Bollywood is serving us, next you may hear a song about Ganpat Rai- a character created by you and etched in our memories forever.