A wise owl or a foolish oolu? – Telegraph Blogs

Friday 14 March 2014 | Blog Feed | All feeds

Peter Foster


A wise owl or a foolish oolu?

Since I started learning Hindi, I've been fascinated and perplexed by the fact that in India an "owl" or "oolu" – is not considered wise as in Britain but is used as a term of fairly gentle derogation, meaning "dolt" or "fool".

Piercing gaze or vacant stare?

Hence the commonly overhead phrase usually from a 'sahib' to his subordinate – "tum oolu ho" "you dunce", "you idiot". I heard a wealthy Indian use it on the golf course just last weekend.

Notwithstanding the fact that "oolu" is plainly a juicer word for that wide-eyed, nocturnal bird than plain old "owl", how is it, I've often wondered, that where Britons see wisdom the owls of my English childhood stories were invariably bespectacled and professorial in aspect Indians see stupidity?

Today, by chance, I found a possible answer to that question or at least to explain the Indian way of seeing things.

Prakash, the talented and amusing photographer I've been working with these past few days, tells me that "owl-like" is commonly used Hindi to describe someone who doesn't have anything to do.

So if, hypothetically speaking, Prakash was sitting round doing nothing, and basically being useless and not fixing the plumbing or earning a living, his wife might say to a friend "Prakash oolu jaisa beitaye" Prakash is sitting round "like an owl".

This came up as Prakash described two vacant young men hanging off a pa'an stall as being "like owls".

He reckons that because you never see owls doing much except perching and staring vacantly ahead, they've become equated in the Indian mind with empty-headed folk who sit around all day doing nothing.

As any foreign visitor to rural India will tell you, one of the things which strikes outsiders is the number of listless men sitting around twiddling their dotis and not much else.

They sit under trees, by wells, in the fields and along the roadsides sometimes just chatting but often staring ahead and doing nothing in particular. And I'm not talking here about the daily communal ritual of nature's call in which they adopt similar posture.

This plague of sitting about is, of course, is a function of that the fact that very often Indian villagers really don't have much to do. No jobs outside harvest or planting time and the useful agency of women to fetch water, cook the dinner and look after the kids.

Instead the men sit for hours on end or rather squat, hanging from their haunches in a manner which would induce almost instant cramp in my legs looking, Prakash suggests, somewhat like 'oolu'.

Of course, none of this explains why we British think of owls as wise, but perhaps the fact that Indians and Britons draw such opposite inferences from owls, says something about the nature of sagacity itself.

I can think of several former bosses and teachers in my short life who conned people by saying very little and watching as their subordinates floundered through the uncomfortable silences of their own, deliberate creation.

It's a cheap trick and, for a while, it enabled them to give the impression of "owl-like" sagacity. Then you'd read an article they'd written, or attend a lecture or class they were giving, and that owlish appearance was exposed for what it was a front.

In fact, they were really "oolu" disguising themselves as "owls".

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