My youngest brother has recently started his residency training somewhere near Chicago and shared with me this very funny story:
I was sitting in the physicians lounge in front of my computer looking up the history of a new patient we got called for, and I could overhear the conversation of few second-year residents. There were two internal medicine residents talking over with a radiology resident (who just finished his preliminary year in internal medicine) about radiology and how laid back a lifestyle it is.
Right behind me, with his back to me, was a Pakistani, and across the room were the other two residents, one Ethiopian and the other Indian - the radiologist. Here's how the conversation went:
"So how many hours do radiologists work?", asked the Ethiopian guy.
"8-5 - normal office hours. On call once a week for the second and third year and never again for the rest of my life". He was so proud of himself, that cocky Indian.
"And how much do they make?"
In comes the Pakistani brother, with the thickest possible desi accent he could conjure, "They make a loadshed of money."
Huh?! What does a loadshed of money mean? How does this Paki FOB know of a word to describe 'huge' or 'enormous' that I don't?! I've realized for a while now that my vocabulary is pretty bad, but now this was just putting me to shame.
So there I sat, trying to come up with a meaning for the word - loadshed, like from the word loadshedding. But that means power failures - what does that have to do with 'alot'? I don't know, maybe if you take off the '-ing' it becomes a totally different word.
Or maybe he was saying loadshed as in 'a shed loaded with money'. That could make sense. Or maybe...
And then came a voice, seemingly to correct my thoughts so I could get back to work.
"Shitload, I mean," he mumbled, but loud enough for me to hear.
"Shit...load, yaar get it straight, shitload." he repeated under his breath, berating himself so as not to make the mistake again.
Mystery solved.
Just don’t call it genocide
1 week ago
9 comments:
Hahaha that is hilarious! It's such a TP thing to do-and me and my friends say "yaar" all the time! It started off with only one friend saying it, but now we all do it, it's infectious! (Great blog by the way, very interesting.)
By the by, you should write something about the basketball game we play every once in while and how 13 year old kids seem to kick the cr** out of us. Well... maybe not you but me.
that was funny.
esp the yaar get it straight part
Dude I dont know why we as people are in such an inferiority complex about english, true they ruled over us for quite a time but not anymore so,get over it.
Do you see any french,germans,japanese(they refuse to speak english even if they know it)fretting over their english? They are proud Germans, Japanese(even after WWII) and proud French respectively, plus more confident and mature of a people, and you on the other hand are definitely some dude with self image issues.
AA- Pakistani,
Yaar, vy don't yoo just take the chill pill. You vill lowe it very much.
Seriously bro, I'm not catching your inferiority complex angle? Please explain...
AA- Syed,
13-year old kids beating us in ball? Hmmm...the older brother was actually 15. :-P
Chill pill taken ;)
I was referring to the characteristic of us Pakistanis thinking very low of people when they make some mistake in english.
So I referred the germans,japs and french people who dont really care how they sound in english when they do decide(and that's rare) to speak the language. Some cases in point are
-firstly you with a title post ' proud to be a Paki...or maybe not'
, so a guy making a mistake in speaking english has made you to doubt your pride in ur own heritage
-people feeling humiliated when Pakistani cricketers speak english
-general day to day conversations
e.t.c.
AA- Pakistani,
"Pakistanis thinking very low of people when they make some mistake in english."
To be honest, I didn't think low of the dude for messing up on his English. I thought low of him for trying to inject profanity into a situation that didn't need it, but he felt by doing so, it would impress his colleagues.
And it backfired on the poor chap.
The inferiority complex is not with me, but with him.
I'm not humiliated by Pakistanis speaking broken English. I'm humiliated by Pakistanis bending over backwards to shed their Pakistani 'baggage', by trying to outdo their western counterparts.
I remember back in college, the most drunken, most outrageous kids were the foreigners (including Pakistanis), who were trying their darnedest to be accepted.
That's the inferiority complex you should be railing on.
Thanks for allowing me to clarify my thoughts.
Point taken.
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