बदलना — to change

बदलना means to change — which is perhaps nothing to get very excited about. But this everyday verb has two points of interest that make it stand out from the herd.Asian Studie

ज"ता — shoe

!रा ज%ता ' जापानी, + पतल%न इ.iग12तानी सर 4 लाल टोपी 7सी, iफर भी iदल ' iह=2तानी !रा ज%ता ' जापानी … This song from Raj Kapoor’s 1955 film >ी ४२० must have graced almost as many Hindi classrooms as it has cinemas. It addresses cultural authenticity, contrasting imported items on the one hand with an abiding Indianness of spirit on the other. Ironically, while Kapoor’s filmic persona seeks to promote Indianness, it actually derives from the ‘tramp’ character developed forty years earlier, in Hollywood, by the British actor Charlie Chaplin.Asian Studie

घuसना — to sneak in

The verb घuसना is so articulate as to be almost a one-word justification for learning Hindi. Its range of meanings, or rather its suggestions and attitudes, is a real challenge for lexicographers, whose various glosses can only hint at what घuसना has to say.Asian Studie

ककत$%यiवम*ढ़ nonplussed, bewildered

This fine expression — actually a Sanskrit phrase rather than a single word — is nicely translated as ‘nonplussed’, which itself derives from the Latin non plus ‘not more’, describing a moment when we can say nothing more about a puzzling situation.Asian Studie

The tale Parfit tells:Analytic Metaphysics of Personal Identity vs. Wittgensteinian Film and Literature

At the center of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons is nestled a famous short story about a person who uses a teletransporter. Parfit argues that his “thought experiment” shows that “personal identity”—as (analytic) philosophy understands it—doesn’t matter. As long as I know that my “self” on Mars is unharmed by the teletransporter, it shouldn’t matter to me that I remain on Earth, soon to die. I use Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige and the Nolan brothers’ film of it to challenge the method and alleged moral of this “branch-line” teletransportation thought experiment, treating it as a work of literature in miniature

कमरा room

Even the most ordinary, everyday words can have an interesting story to tell. कमरा is one of the first Hindi nouns a learner encounters, and many course-books use it to introduce the ‘oblique case with postposition’ construction: कम% & 'या ) ?Asian Studie