Watching the Olympics is a treat one can avail of only every four years. Even if one is not a hardcore sports enthusiast, it's awe-inspiring to see these humans with such grit, determination, commitment, and perfection in performance. The Olympics is one of the few truly global events. It's dedicated to pure sport. 

We usually watch events on ESPN, or Star Sports. Occasionally, we go to good old Doordarshan. Sometimes they telecast a sporting event no one else is showing. Watching events on Doordarshan is a different sort of experience, because the commentary is in Hindi. And it's good Hindi. I realized it's been ages since I watched TV in Hindi. It pleasantly exercised my mind to listen to and recall the meaning of Hindi terms such as pratiyogita, khiladi, rajat, muqabbla, mukkebaazi and so on. I was struggling to understand out what kansya padak meant. The context  helped; it is the word for bronze medal. These wonderful words took me back to class 10, the only time I had developed a reasonably strong Hindi vocabulary.  

One rarely gets to hear this kind of good, or should I say shudh Hindi in this part of the country. The last time I heard people using such words was in Ahmedabad, when a friend hailing from the Himalayas talked. Her spoken Hindi was so good, to novices like me it felt as if a sage was reading an ancient granth. The true Hindi of north India has a beautiful vocabulary, and is pleasant to hear. The Bambaiya Hindi (freely used in Mumbai and a lot of Pune) is a bhel-puri of Hindi, inflections of other tongues, Marathi syntax and grammar, the occasional Gujarati slang, and just about anything thrown in. It's a language of its own, with jewels such as tu kai ko karta hai?, hum wahan jayenga and so on. It's both hilarious and insulting to those who uphold the 'pure' Hindi, but it works for the great masses such as myself. It lets us communicate. To get our dose of the good stuff, we turn to DD. 

Remember the time when friends, siblings, or entire families crowded around Scrabble boards? It was a time when our prime occupation, for those few hours, was words. We accused one another, “There’s no such word in the English language.” A self-appointed referee could open the hard-bound dictionary (Webster’s, Collins, or Oxford’s) to check if the disputed word existed. More accusations - “You saw that word just now in the dictionary.” There were moments of sheer agony - when a player blocked a place on the board that you were eyeing. And there were moments of ecstasy when you managed a Triple Word Score. Remember how we prayed while picking those little square letters from an old, tattered tea cover? “God! Please let me not get one more L, N, Y, or E.”

During these sessions, we learnt new words and their meanings. We built a good rapport and grudging respect. We argued and our friendships only got better. It was a time when we played with words. We thought about words, juggled them, pulled them out from our memory banks and hoped no one caught us if we spelt a word wrongly. In desperation, especially with a Double or Triple Word Score beckoning, we even tried inventing new ones! And then, it was of course, back to God. 

I do not know how many households encourage their children to play this wonderful board game. I do not know how many of the present generation know about this game. How many know, but simply do not care? And even if people do play this game, I am glad we did not have to go online, join some session of scrabble, and play with a stranger.