By the time students are done with college life, they have soaked in so much of the campus culture that one can identify their alma mater just by the way they express themselves.
So, when a girl clad in skinny jeans greets her squealing friends with a ‘Babe!’ chances are that she is a student of an arts college in the city.
Elzabe Ipe, an economics student from Madras Christian College, says, “I have had experiences in public spaces of people spotting me as a ‘MCC-ian’ because I often use words like halls, hall day, boxing ring, ODs and gutters. These words are very specific to the MCC lingo.”
Or, if she gushes about seeing a ‘dude’ at the ‘OAT’, we know it’s a Stella Maris ‘chick’ talking about a rare sighting at the campus’ Open Air Theatre.
College campuses are also where the colloquial first donned its ‘cool’ cloak. It is on campuses that ‘machan’ or ‘mama’ went mainstream in the 90s, biting even the cool non-Tamil speaking students.
It also birthed the trend of shortening words, wherein the longer (and correct versions) were rendered ‘uncool’. The principal is referred to as ‘princi’ in hushed hallways, the ‘calci’ is borrowed to hurry along a difficult math problem, Sathyam has opened bookings for ‘tix’ for ‘Two States’, and ‘deets’ on a friend’s relationship are demanded.
Colleges also saw a wave of bad English spoken on purpose as a way to make fun of Indianisms. Megha Vinod, a former student body president of Stella Maris, recalls, “When you said ‘I want to keep friendship with you’ to someone, it used to crack everyone up!”
With Chennai attracting students from all over the country, although knowing English helps, learning some Tamil words becomes important to be part of the ‘in-crowd’, sometimes, with hilarious outcomes. ‘Chumma’, meaning a kiss in Hindi, is used often in Chennai to mean ‘simply’, confusing many who are hearing the word bandied about in that context for the first time.
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It is a well-known fact that there were more first-time voters on the voter’s lists this Lok Sabha election than for any other previous election.
While most political parties worked out their permutations and combinations to attract the young voter, a popular apparel brand has done a survey on the real impact of a popular film star meeting a politician, on a young voter; more specifically, if all the ‘handshake’ photos would have any impact at all.
Indigo Nation’s curiously titled ‘Dude Index - Subject to Change’ surveyed 1,000 persons in the age group of 18 to 35 years to find out if the star associations that some politicians so eagerly sought ahead of polling would translate to votes. Reportedly, 75 per cent of ‘dudes’ were hardly swayed by the star factor. That still did not stop them from sharing those photos on social networks, making them go viral. The youth may be star-struck but they also know when to put on their thinking caps, it seems.
Way to go, dude!
(By Evelyn Ratnakumar, Sneha Susan John, and Karthik Subramanian)