Adil Najam
What is the most appropriate word for ‘GanDeri’ in English?
I have puzzled over this for long and asked a number of friends. In fact, this is a re-post of the question I had posed at this blog 3 years ago. The best I got was ‘sugarcane cut-piece’; where ‘cut-piece’ is itself a peculiar Pakistani-ism, if not Pinglish.
Do you have a better suggestion?
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Reminds me of a famous Naseebo Lal song
Thand pavay gi kallejay dildaar, vay pyaar di ganderi choop le
Vith ravay na doovaaN day vichkaar, vay pyaar di ganderi la la la ! :)
gotta commend the creative genius behind this lyrical masterpiece!
” Sugar Cane Chunks”
What’s wrong with calling it just “GanDeri”. It’s not a difficult word to pronounce for people who don’t know Punjabi.
Why don’t we call it “Ganderi” in English also and leave it at that? After all English has loaned all kinds of words from German, Latin, Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Urdu, Sanskrit, French, Swahili, etc., and then made them its own, so much so that we do not even recognize them any more.
Hor ganay choopo, is a famous Punjabi story. Where a couple of friends were trying to come up with an idea of how to be rich (just like sheik chilli key mansoobay). One of them came up with an idea to grow sugar cane (or cane sugar?) in the field and then sell them. They get very excited with this idea. Then suddenly one of them said, “But the Ghujar will steal our cane sugar and eat it (choopa ga, not a nice word I know)”. Ghujar being their neighbour and a pitty thief. So they went to his house and beat the hell out of him by saying “Hoor gana chopoo” (eat more sugar cane)…..