Bhopal, April 21 -- You're walking down a road. It's a perfectly lovely day, the kind where the breeze smells of early summer and two-stroke engine fumes. A group of men passes you-just friends returning from chai. You catch a scrap of their conversation. It's not much, just four syllables. Three are profane. The fourth is "aap".
Welcome to Bhopal, where gaalis are not just expressions of rage, but an essential part of the city's linguistic identity. In this city, cussing isn't always offensive-it's sometimes affectionate, often humorous, and almost always loud.
Even if Bhopalis use this phraseology to replace everything from nouns to adjectives, cussing people out with the respectful second-person pronoun "aap" is deemed acceptable. But ...