Foot The Pan

There will not be a single person in India (educated in India) who hasn't come across the "F" syndrome or the even rare "F/P" syndrome. I'm fortunate enough to have seen it in school, college and my work-places. The common "F" syndrome is nothing but the replacement of "P" with "F" while pronouncing words usually starting with "P" and sometimes in words that have "P" anywhere within. Examples would be "flug" for plug, "fleet" for pleet, "get uf" for get up and so on. The converse of this is the "P" syndrome where the opposite happens. i.e, "Jyothi Boshu ees peet only por drinking fefsi and eating pish pry" and so on. This is extensively used by the people of West Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, U.P and even in the rest of the country.
Rarely do both the phenomenons manifest in the same person. Blessed are those who come across such persons. Quality entertainment at no expense and the best part is you won't even be called a sadist*.
Recently one of my team-mates was narrating her experiences with her schoolteacher who had the "F/P" syndrome. It was the first day for our ma'am and she found on entering the class that the fan was switched off. As the noise turned into murmurs and finally into silence, the teacher shouted "Foot the pan!". Imagine the plight of the students - remember, they still didn't know about the teacher's syndrome and it took them a good 2 minutes to figure out what the ma'am wanted [ignore the wrong usage of the sentence "Foot the pan"]. I can think of many rib-tickling tales from my own experiences but they follow the same drift.
The surprising part is it feels good to do it ourselves, pronouncing words as though you had the syndrome yourself. I once instructed my deeply-engrossed-and-concentrating team mate who was working on a piece of code to "cofy" [a chunk of code] and without realizing what i meant and without batting an eye-lid he replied back "Not now, Bala, we'll have it later...".

Q: Don't the sufferers listen to other "normal" people speaking? Or is it a genetic problem? Surely, they must've heard the word PANT being pronounced a thousand times. How could they possibly still say "FANT"? Questions, and no answers.....

To end, how about trying to ask a sufferer to read this
"Poetry is the powerful flow of spontaneous feelings"



*Well, you might, actually. There is a thin line between being called a sadist and not being called one, when you have fun at the expense of the sufferers. If the "fun-haver" is me, its not sadistic, otherwise it is. Simple!