Dousing the Fire

Maybe it was the illustrious company of fellow BC Quizzer and one of the Chakravyuuh (COEP's own open quiz) organizers, Anup Mankar, but together we may have cracked one of the many annoying puzzles of recent Bollywood titles. If you're among one of those who likes to keep a close eye on titles of the form X the Y, you would know one of the earliest and most famous was Daag the Fire. Everyone thought this was an awful piece of translation from Hindi to English. But fikar not, here is an implausible theory for it.

Anup told me about the impending meeting with Dr. AAG, a high ranking PIET official (let it be said that samajhdaar ko ishaara ...), on the matter of the quiz. The natural response to someone saying aag was to expand it and say Oh, you mean Aag the Fire? And then, like a firebolt gone astray, it hit us: the makers must have started off with The Aag the Fire which some enterprising sub-editor somewhere contracted, for lack of space, into the now notorious Daag the Fire.

For more of the same (what some Tamil speakers would call "veTTi pech.u"), please visit the Boat Club quizzes, Saturdays at 12 noon. No wonder that the senior Mankar thinks his youngest-born is wasting his time on weekends.)