'What a family!'

My cousin sister Nisha and her husband Rudy (short for Anirudh) got married about a year and a half back. They stay in Hong Kong and were visiting India last week.

When they were here, we decided to play Taboo one evening. Taboo is basically a board game where you have to describe a word that you've been assigned without uttering a set of other words. The word itself and the 'taboo' words are in a card you have to pick. There are other rules too but that's the gist.

So, we divided ourselves into two teams and started off.

My family is generally quite boisterous. Most of us speak loudly, laugh loudly and well, whisper loudly! Rumor has it that one of our Parsi neighbors got a heart attack when Nisha reacted to a piece of good news one afternoon many years back!

Especially in situations like this when honor is at stake, we can get quite passionate about winning and make every point count!

Sure enough, within a few minutes we all got very excited. We started fighting (in a good way) over every point! The members of each team would distract the other team during their turn. We were all fighting, yelling and laughing at the same time (if you know what I mean!).

Now, Rudy was not used to this. Till then, he thought only Nisha was a rowdy! That evening, he realized that his wife's behavior was more genetic! "What a family!", he exclaimed repeatedly!

He kept telling us, "Guys, we are here to have fun!". All of us responded in unison, "This is our idea of fun!"

Comments

Anonymous said…
I was wondering (until now) why some softspeaking residents in Hongkong have decided to move out of what used to be a quite neighbourhood on Robinson Road !
PDS said…
kamal u must post about karan's hillarious incident during the game.
Kamal D Shah said…
Are you kidding me? There is a famous Chinese saying: "不要混淆" which translates to "Don't mess with Godzilla"!
Kartik said…
lol, you called him Godzilla! So you already messed with him ;)

Also "不要混淆" translates to "Do not confuse".

Now "不要惹哥斯拉" really translates to "Do not mess with Godzilla"

From all this I just learned that "不要" means "Do not"
Anonymous said…
I just laughed and laughed and could not stop.. thanks Kamal
Nagaraj said…
I just laughed and laughed and could not stop.. thanks Kamal
Anonymous said…
The very first sentence in this article popped something in my brain - "cousin sister".

I totally understand that there is no other possible way to precisely indicate that yoy are referring to a cousin of yours, who happens to be a female other than through this phrase.

Here in the US, they just do not use this phrase at all - just "cousin". How confusing and ambigous right??

Does english legally allow this phrase?

Vinay
Kamal D Shah said…
Hi Vinay,

Yes cousin is ambiguous. I really do not know if cousin sister is legal or not. All I can say is we've all been using it for ages!

Kamal
B said…
In typical Telugu culture, the phrase "cousin sister" has even more meaning because within the first cousins ...father's brother's children and mother's sister's children are considered brothers/sisters whereas father's sister's children and mother's brother's children are NOT considered brothers/sisters.
Anonymous said…
Had a great time that evening...and thanks for all the food Feini!


Every holiday Rudy has in Hyd he has yet another surprise on how passionate the Ferndales can get..last time it was Ava aunty and mummy singing during Christmas...and it was hard to get them to stop till the wee hours of the morning:))
Karan Shah said…
Dude..I totally forgot about the incident..What was it? Don't worry im no Godzilla anymore..Thank you relationship!
Kamal D Shah said…
You got some word. There was a fight about the time. It was suggested that you pick another word. You insisted that you would do the same word. After a great deal of fighting everyone agreed. Then you started doing the word. A few seconds later, you realized the word was too tough and gave up!!!

Boooozhhhoon!