Inside jokes

Jokes are supposed to make people laugh. They don’t make us cry…some exceptionally good ones and exceptionally bad ones do though. But there are some jokes that can make us intensely sad and happy at the same time…

When you spend a lot of time with a certain group of people you are bound to share some special anecdotes, invent some strange mannerisms and scheme some diabolic dialects that even the wittiest of the outsiders would not be able to unravel. While using such evolved maxims rarely do people realise their true worth. It’s when you have to be somewhere else away from that gang and you suddenly make a classified remark and others stare at you with puzzled countenances that you realise their value and …a pang shatters your heart…

School days now seem to be a distant past…yet the casual banters of those days will never go stale. Two very popular phrases were “mone ku” and “consult kore insult”. “Mone ku” translates to a “devious mind” but we used it to refer to a secret (and not so sacred) soft spot for someone! “Consult kore insult” was our equivalent of ganging up on someone.

In college “nongra chaat” and “full out” were very much in vogue. The original phrase was not “full out”…we had to tone the original phrase down! (I won’t tell you what it was.) “Nongra chaat” does not have any vulgar or salacious innuendo. It just means that someone has brewed up an outrageous and somewhat preposterous story. The meaning of “full out” is very hard to explain…it’s an intuitive phrase…you have to be there to get the essence!

I have seen my mother often use some strange phrases when she’s talking to her brother and sister. They rampantly say “dosh minute rest and dosh minutes bisraam”. I’ve also heard them say “detept” for defect and “harach” for harass and laugh over it again and again. With some prodding I got to know that they had picked up those words from the gardener who tended the garden in their childhood. His every mispronounced word and outlandish phrase had a bizarre appeal to the young minds of my mother and her siblings. They have long left behind their childhood days yet in each other’s company they often tend to use those phrases which had caught their fancy a long time ago…and each time I have seen them successfully recreate the lost aura of their childhood.

The inside jokes are a unique breed... At their inception they gift us unadulterated mirth and glee and they continue to be with us long after they go out of trend…to bring a smile to the lips…a tear to the eye…