My earliest memories of ‘Telugu ka basha’ (తెలుగు క భాష for the purists) are from my growing up days in Chennai. A little background on me, again: Born into a Telugu family, grew up in Chennai, schooled in the Kendriya Vidhyalaya CBSE system translates to: Can speak Telugu / Tamil , Can’t read or write Telugu / Tamil, Can read/write/doodle/elocute fluently in Hindi.
So ka basha was this mysterious, fast flowing, code-like undecipherable language my parents seemed to converse in once in a while with the eventual outcome of such conversations being me or my brother getting caned.
I was always puzzled as to how born of them I dint imbibe or pickup this language. My mom used ka basha surreptitiously to tell dad of my bad behavior or poor performance in tests. I tried catching the nuances of the language by watching them in action but their code was fool proof because I dint know how to read or write Telugu and was completely unaware of it’s alphabet; not completely true now though, for over the many years that I’ve been watching Telugu films the typography on the posters has familiarized me with Aa , Ka, Ra (espically Victory Venkatesh’s films like kalisundham ra, Jayam manadhe ra, Premanteidhe ra, Prematho ra and many others SRK’s Ra–One got not on Venkatesh’s many Raa’s)
One out of frustration I asked mom to spill the beans of on the language on the basis of my right to information act. She tried to explain it in layman terms “break down words into letters and add a ka prefix to each letter” I tried and gave up in frustration. It was too demanding for my instant gratification seeking acumen.
Today after all those years I remembered ‘ka basha’ somehow. I call this the regurgitation phase of my life. I searched around a bit for info on ka basha and surprisingly no information was found unless I find a way to query the deep web maybe.
So my next best bet was to call mom n dad they dint answer. The fickleness of my though stream drove me to distress as I felt if I dint blog this reminiscence now it would be earmarked for permanent deletion by my brain. I buzzed the only Telugu Vidhwan I knew, PM*. Luckily she was online, though in incognito mode, like always ;)
I used http://telugu.changathi.com/ to get the title of this post in Telugu and sent it to her. For the grammar nazi meets puritan rage type that she is, she instantly pointed out
Telugu radu kani vere languages enduku neeku?
first of all...it's not "KHA"
it's "KA"
(notice the appropriate usage of punctuation in an IM conversation ! I rest my case haha)
So Continuing
some people who wanted to 'code' their sentences used ka in front of every alphabet
for eg. "na peru harini" translates to..
wait let me try “kana kaperu kaharini”
aa tondara ee oddu annedhi, the right answer is
"ka na ka pe ka ru ka ha ka ri ka ni"
danlo code emundi bochu
Me: temme anything else u kno about ka basha
watch that chiranjeevi's old movie Chanti aabai. In that he uses a lot of ka bhasha.
Me: pond james pond. haha. Btw is Ka Basha taught in schools ?
cha ! no ma :P . it's out of syllabus.
Thank you PM. Here is a pic for you.
p.s.
* name changed to protect identity :P
if after reading this page you have more info to contribute on ka basha please leave a comment & email address and I will get in touch with you. May be we can author a Wikipedia page on ka basha.
“Out of Syllabus” , That line was my go to excuse in school when I got less marks on tests.haha :)
