While driving back from work tonight, I took a trip down the memory lane. The trip took me back 24 years where I saw a guy named Iftikhar and it made me laugh out loud. Iftikhar was the muffakir (intellectual) and the mascot of our street cricket team. He was especially gifted in coming up with on-the-spot terminologies and one such master piece creation was the word tatoli.
This word does not exist in any language but those who understand Urdu can relate to it from the word tatol. Therefore simply put, a cricketer who fumbles (tatol) a lot is called a tatoli. To understand the concept more see this 29 second video clip.
For those who still didn’t get it, you can imagine a person in a dark room. May be close your eyes to imagine this situation and then open them after 5 seconds so that you can read this post further. If this person has to move in a dark room from one corner to the other then how will he do that? He will of-course do that by fumbling (tatol tatol kar) with the articles in the room with his hands. I hope now you understand the meaning of word tatol.
In Iftikhar’s cricket terminology a tatoli was the person who habitually tatoled. Just like Rana Naved does in the video clip above. He is doing a classical tatol tatol kar fielding karna.
Good old days!
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Aziz
i hope your ‘washmallay’ singer was not Iqbal Qasim. Iqbal was very famous 25 or so years ago for singing ‘washmallay’. I remember attending a school function in grade III where Iqbal Qasim sang ‘washmallay’ on stage.
Naan Halim
In 90s there was a PTV drama from Lahore where a character had a takya-kalaam of ‘shukar hai – shukar hai’. This became synonymous with the street fast bowlers in Karachi :) Imagine this connection. If a bowler bowled really fast balls with balls leaving a batsman right and left then we used to used to say this bowler is a ‘shukar hai – shukar hai’ bowler because ‘shukar hai’ the batsman didn’t touch the balls :)
Owais,
Washmally was an alias for a person who used the sing the Baluchi song Vash Malle all the time. That name is still stuck with him after 25 years :)
Naan Haleem, “Actually Spring” reminded me of one such guy in our mohalla also. He had same characteristics but we called him Maindak. Well, I don’t need to explain why :)
Well if we are talking about the aliases here then I had another friend in the same school whom we first used to call ‘Chawanni’ (25 paisa coin) for him being smaller in hight yet wobbling everywhere (in every group of the class). Later on, some class fellows named him “Actually Spring”. This name was given for his habit of springing up to ask questions each time when the class was getting bored of long lecture and his frequent use of the word ‘Actually’. But the name which brought him fame was “Phadda” (contention) on account of his habit of arguing in every issue and making simple things look complex. This was a unanimously decided, widely communicated and frequently used alias. Even today after 16 years of leaving school, he is remembered as ‘Phadda’ :-) Now he is a successful chemical engineer in a large industry near Lahore.