HOW ARE YOU SIRJI ?

Kaise hain SirJi ?

The moment our eyes locked,his face lit up.He is my neighbour,a few houses down the road. With a toothy grin suffusing his broad countenance and body irradiating friendly warmth,he queried,

“Kaise hain SirJi ?”

As far as I can remember ,our road side encounters have been this way only - eye contact, broad smile ,this very same conversation opener followed by ‘politically’ incorrect neighbourly chit chat.

Only of late he has taken to adding  Ji to Sir . Sometimes  it is spoken as one word Sirji ,at most other times he lays equal emphasis on Sir and Ji with a moment’s interval in between, Sir-Ji .All depends on the level of cheeriness in his mood.I was comfy with just the ‘Sir’ for it was adequately deferential .So there wasn’t really any pressing need to suffix  Ji . In the days of the Raj,the reverential response used to be ‘Ji Huzoor’,and now  more commonly heard in government portals is ‘Ji Sir’.Either way  Ji is a prefix and it means ‘yes’,no more.Therefore a Ji suffixed SirJi can only invest double honours. Whatever,adding ‘regards’ tonnage to an addressee as unassuming and as humble as I,was undeserved. Maybe,in a polite way it recognised a newly acquired status -senior citizen.Blessed be he for a  ‘freebie’ honorifical , SirJi.

However I have other weightier reasons to squirm at SirJi and one such touches   divinity itself. If Lord Ganesh, in common parlance ,is  GaneshJi ,do humans qualify for the ‘twice over’ reverence, SirJi ? Even Mishraji, Vijayji... may incur God’s malevolence. Humans shouldn't claim communion with Gods.  

A Kanhaiyajee or  Ramjee is fine;it couldn’t be otherwise for obvious reasons.Such innately  ‘honorified’ Indians are not alone in the comity of nations.Koreans too impregnate their names with Ji. As many as 80% Korean names have Ji or a play upon it like chee, gi, je, jee, chi as a suffix or prefix .Ji Ho and Ji Hu are common names for boys, Ji woo and Ji yoo for girls. Ji in Korean means wealth and wealth in itself confers honorific . No need to add a further Ji. We though have a problem, a ‘Ramjee  jee’ address sounds queer.

Still the Ji sambodhan is commonplace and giving way to the still more weightier SirJi .Across arterial roads inside any cluster of coaching centres a typical archway adorning these roads is more than likely to have banners with a beaming girl chanting “main toh Physics padhoogi Arjun SirJi se hein” (I will learn Physics only from Arjun SirJi). Sooner than later, Ji will fall into disuse and SirJi 

will enter the Oxford lexicon.

SirJi is obviously an etymological evolution,a product of cross pollination between Anglo- Indian notions of respectful title.As with progenies born of genetic hybridisation the product is more robust and virile .It will be little surprise if SirJi dons the mantle of accepted honorific across all Indian linguistic zones.Good if it does,it gels wonderfully with our syncretic culture,synthesising the  colonial legacy of ‘Sir’ with  Indianness of Ji.

My friend ,though,disagrees. On a first name calling basis otherwise, in a foul mood he is prone to switch to  SirJi; ’aap galat hai SirJi ,or ‘choodiye SirJi’, ‘jaane dijiye SirJi’,(you are wrong, SirJi ,leave it SirJi  ,let it go SirJi).I suppose in his mathematical world two positives a negative make, not the other way round. For him, SirJi is a term of disparagement than endearment. 
  

 Regardless of his reservations,the hyphenation Sir-Ji is dripping  in reverence .But hold on ,it would be a grave error to presume that 

other permutations with Ji would be adulatory too.For instance,take 

Dear and Ji. Mr Ashok chaudhary, HRD minister, Bihar, burnt his fingers when he tweeted to ‘Dear Smt Smriti Irani Ji’,  HRD 

Minister at Centre.She turned crimson,how dare a state minister ‘Dear’ her ? Officialese notwithstanding, it was deemed a frontal assault on womanhood .The ‘victim’ ,Smriti Irani ,promptly took her plaint to FB with a longish outpouring of injured feminism.The 

upshot of the FB diarrhoea–only the husband had ‘Dear’ calling rights, other must use forms of “Undeared” address. Some doubting Thomas’s still question why Dear and Ji are  antithetical and gender sensitive.

Was all the huff and puff really needed? Without the brouhaha over 

feminism Mr Chaudhry would have been fully scuppered had Smt 
Irani chosen the right line. The offending word wasn't Dear it was Ji. Mr Chaudhary had no business pointing a Ji ,a pole arm, an armour ,at a fair damsel who only later was to be in distress. In the good old days of Ming dynasty the pole arm – a pole with a pointed spearhead and a dagger embedded on one side, killed many in 

battles.

But the word ji also connotes love or dread depending on how far you have travelled in conjugal life. ‘Ai Ji ‘ is a uniquely Indian stratagem deployed by wives to draw attention of husbands to 

themselves especially  in rural parts of North India where  it is not customary for a wife to call the husband by name.A year or two into marriage the husband’s heart goes aflutter when wife utters those magical words ‘Ai Ji. A decade later,the heart sinks at the beckon from the dread of losing money or expending physical labour .

Nevertheless, we,Indian,love Ji .Even biscuits are venerated with Ji,say,Parle G and Reliance doesn't forget to prefix Ji in the name of its latest offering ,JIO. Ji is our very heart and mind ,literally .We have even dedicated a popular song from Bollywood blockbuster ‘Ram Lakhan’ to  Ji

“Ai ji ,O ji ,Lo ji, Suno ji
mai hun man mauji,
karta hun mai jo,
tum bhi karo ji ,
one two ka four….”