Gender Finder – 2: Now unlike my father, I used to do a different kind

of gender finding. As we all know, in the English language, there are

three clear genders – Masculine, Feminine and Neuter. Even in Sanskrit

we have 3 genders – Masculine - pulling, Feminine - streeling and

Neuter - napunsakling. But in Hindi, our national language, we have

just two genders, Masculine and Feminine, which are assigned to all

things living and inanimate. When they are living things, it is easy

enough to find out the gender, but when it comes to inanimate objects,

there is just no logic, rule or any other type of guideline one can

follow to identify if the said object is male or female.

I

have always thought my grammar to be strong in all the three languages

mentioned above, but Hindi gender finding was too tough. My friends

used to find my mistakes funny and my teachers used to think my Hindi

wasn’t good enough and even suggested I go in for some special

coaching. I used to try and ask friends how they identified the gender

of a, b, c, and so on, but got know proper answers. Most of them spoke

Hindi as it was their mother tongue. If only there were that many

inanimate objects in the world as there are alphabets in the English

language, then I would have mastered the gender-finder art to

perfection. So I started devising other ways by listening to people

talk and learn from their conversation whether a book was female or a

cup was male and so on. But there again I found, not all the people I

spoke to were speaking correct language all the time, just as not all

of us can spell words correctly all the time despite being

well-educated.

Then I hit upon a brilliant idea which worked

for me – Hindi movie names and movie song https://lyrics. Wow! Wish I had

thought of it earlier, I could’ve been spared a lot of embarrassment

and tension. But never mind, better late than never! I figured that

when the movie producers named their movies or when the song writers

did their writing, they would definitely have consulted either a

dictionary/thesaurus or at least a Hindi pundit.

So they became my

Dictionary/Thesaurus and helped me find genders correctly. Well most of

the time! Now, whenever I have to speak in Hindi where correct language

matters, I just quickly browse through my mental database of song

lyrics and movie names and hit upon the correct gender 99% of the time.

I now know that it is meri kahaani (my story), so that makes kahani

(story) feminine; tera kasoor (your fault), kasoor (fault) is male and

so on. Meri Jung (my battle) which makes Jung feminine; Mera kuch saamaan... so the samaan is male and the list is endless.  But I sure did learn a lot and now I speak near perfect Hindi.