Nepalis have spoken English for almost a century now. But we have dug large pits and holes all over the alien language. We have adjusted and modified it as per our requirements and have incorporated new meanings out of nowhere.

Hey, two men are about to rip off each other but relax; they’re just having a discussion. If a microbus driver does not accept your students ID card, you start to have a “discuss.” Your neighbour’s child breaks a windowpane and again you sit down and have a “discuss.”

This may sound a bit satirical. My hopes were shattered when the word “satire” evolved into a typical Nepali “shatter.” Why hit a “shatter” on somebody when you don’t know the right spelling and pronunciation. Have you been “hotmailing” your cousin brother from the nearby “cyber”? Or has your dad been “racking” you? I wondered why a father would be so merciless as to throw furniture at his son. I later came to know that the term was “ragging” which had become “racking.” Still why would a father rag his son?

I am very curious about those who never get a scratch, or an electric shock or the slightest digital perforation while visiting the “cyber” regularly.

Isn’t the term supposed to be a cyber café or Internet café? A cyber alone can never mean a place to surf Internet and I guess you’d never want to melt down a computer by hotmailing someone. “Variety” is another word. Longman dictionary defines it as a difference in quality or condition. But when I go to someone’s house for a dinner and served a “variety”, I’m bedazzled. How can grilled drumsticks that look just the same and even taste the same be a “variety”? The gloomy fact is that the Nepali meaning for the word delicacy is “variety”.

There are other foreign words which mean something totally different in Nepali. It’s sad to know that “harami” and “babbal” are not all that obnoxious. It’s depressing to note how foreign words can mean something inappropriate. People just don’t bother to find out what they’re speaking actually means. In fact, they continue using it till it becomes their very own which is why if someone rags me I just e-mail him a variety of satirical comments from the cyber café.