Gender Finder – 3: Having learnt all this myself, I tried to teach my

little school-going daughter some of the ways of identifying gender in

Hindi, while explaining to her that English and Sanskrit have 3

genders, but Hindi has only 2 genders. There is no napunsakling in the

Hindi language. Naturally she believed me, she believed her school

teachers and she believed her text books, which reiterated all that I

had said.

One day she came running to me on her return from

school and said “Mummy, you know what?” I asked “What?” She said, “You

were wrong, there IS a napunsakling in Hindi too.” I said “No, there

isn’t” and started going over everything once again with her, reminding

her that the textbooks or her teachers couldn’t be wrong too. She

looked at me thoughtfully for a while, with her cute, innocent, but

intelligent eyes and said, “Then why did our PT sir, say that the Govt.

was behaving like a napunsak about the recent release of terrorists

from jail in exchange for hostages?” I was clean bowled and effectively

rendered speechless.

( End of Gender Finder Series)