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Yesterday I was watching the post-election victory speech of our Damojee in Baroda...it happens that it was the first speech of his that I was privileged to hear, although I read that he had made hundreds of speeches during his fire-in-the-belly campaign recently.
And I was impressed.
Talking of the 'paanch lakh sattar hazaaar' (5,70,000) ... 'paanch lakh sattar hazaaar!!!' votes that his voters gave him as an unprecedented majority margin, he was quoting the Hindi proverb:
which roughly means:
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Yesterday I was watching the post-election victory speech of our Damojee in Baroda...it happens that it was the first speech of his that I was privileged to hear, although I read that he had made hundreds of speeches during his fire-in-the-belly campaign recently.
And I was impressed.
Talking of the 'paanch lakh sattar hazaaar' (5,70,000) ... 'paanch lakh sattar hazaaar!!!' votes that his voters gave him as an unprecedented majority margin, he was quoting the Hindi proverb:
"Upparwala deta hai toh chappar phaar ke deta hai",
which I believe translates roughly to:
"When the god above decides to shower favors he does it crashing the roof"
But he was gracious enough to refrain from quoting the punch line that completes the proverb:
"Jab vo leta hai toh chaddi phaar ke leta hai"
("When he decides to take away, he does it tearing off the pink panties")
This proverb reminded me of a famous Telugu verse in the Sumati Shatakam that goes:
Siri ta vacchchina vachchunu
Salalitamuga naarikela salilamu bhangin
Siri ta poina povenu
Kari mringina velagapandu karanini sumati
which roughly means:
When Laxmi Devi decides to enter,
She enters as effortlessly as water enters the bulging coconut in the tree;
When She decides to quit,
She vanishes like the (pulp in) the wood apple swallowed by an elephant.
It is well-known how water from the good earth is sucked up unseen into the coconut growing on its tree.
But the reference to the wood apple is the belief that the wood apple that enters the mouth of the elephant is too tiny for the tusker to bother to bite and chew...it swallows it whole.
But after a while when the digestion is complete, the wood apple is ejected at the outlet of the alimentary canal of the elephant good and whole looking as if nothing has gone wrong with it during its tortuous journey within the entrails of the elephant. But a careful examination of the ejected fruit reveals that it is a mere hollow shell of its former self...all the pulp within it had been sucked up by the acids in the elephant's tummy by a process akin to osmosis, the shell acting as a semi-permeable membrane that we read in our physical chemistry.
In our election context however, our Italian wood apple had not been eaten up by the Maya elephant which was caught in a stupor...
...It was sucked up dry by the harmless saffron lotus in the Ganges...
...Posted by Ishani
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