A not-so-happy realisation
I was under the illusion that I had successfully built a protective shield of flippancy around myself to keep emotions and sentiments away. Until I got to know that ullus don’t ululate. I always thought ululation was what ullus did all the time. I had grudgingly accepted this long ugly-sounding word because I thought it captured the idiosyncrasies of a creature that is unfortunately named ullu in a language spoken by millions. For people who don’t know, ullu is a Hindi word that means owl which looks something like this -
I was burning in anger, dipping in the salty sea of sadness, jumping out crying ‘ouch!’, burning again, and dipping again when I read the following report. It may or may not have been published in a newspaper that may or may not exist -
Ullus don’t ululate, study confirms
A study that had been going on for exactly twenty years finally concluded that ullus have nothing to do with ululation. The chief scientist gave us the details of the study in this exclusive interview -
Could you tell us about the research?
The research was divided into two parts. The first part was to figure out the meaning of ululation. It took us four years to establish that it’s a type of sound. It took us fifteen more years to recreate the sound in the lab. It was not easy to get the pitch and tone right but once it was done, we leaped to the second part.
What was the second part?
It involved bringing thousands of ullus to a single place and bribing them to ululate. None of them did. The bribes ranged from food items to the bulkiest guy in our team dancing on the songs entirely made of ululating sounds. We also added some disco beats expecting the ullus to start moving their necks. We hoped that with moving necks they would eventually start mimicking the sound.
Did it work?
It was interesting to note that all the ullus exhibited a common behaviour - they flew away as soon as the bribes were offered.
What were the challenges you faced?
There were many challenges like the medical bills of the dancing guy. He had an epilepsy attack trying to follow the ululating notes in his dance steps. Another difficulty was to find his replacement. But all these were trivial issues compared to what we faced with that one stubborn ullu. Despite all our efforts it was neither ululating nor flying off. It was polluting our data and hampering our research. Every morning we would go to the assembly point expecting that it would be gone but it lay on its back there without moving. In a couple of days it started emitting an odour which helped us revive our research on the nature of owl-farts. But in the current research, we couldn’t conclude anything until this ullu either flew away or ululated.
How did you finally come to the conclusion?
In one of our venting sessions after the day’s work, our dancer lost it. He said, ‘the ullu is so dead if it doesn’t move tomorrow’. There came the Eureka moment. I didn’t hear ‘tomorrow’. We immediately sent the ullu to the relevant labs. In only three hundred and sixty days we got the confirmation that our assumption was correct. The ullu indeed had been dead for all these days. That is when we pressed the send button and informed all the major newspapers. What more proof did we need? An ullu would rather be dead than ululate.
Reading this broke my heart. I am aware that cats aren’t supposed to caterwaul, dogs aren’t supposed to be dogmatic, cows don’t necessarily cower, and goats are as far from gloating as they are from death by natural causes. Huge leaps in language need to be taken to make these similar-sounding words work. But this leap can be justified if the language is different. If one word is in Hindi and the other is in English for example. If billis can bellow, kukurs can be cockers, gaays can giggle, and bakris can bicker then there is no reason why ullus can’t ululate. If you believe that none of the animals mentioned above do any of these things then you, dear reader, are part of a problem. A problem that turns a man like me into a manic.