Well, I was thinking about how people have described various parts of our body in variety of literature. But, fingers, which we use for variety of purposes, have been rather neglected. It is beyond my, current, capability to make an attempt to describe or praise fingers poetically as others have described face, nose, eyes etc. But, let me see what best I can write about fingers.

We, Indians, use different fingers to convey different messages. Our gestures using fingers sometimes have totally different meanings in other cultures. We raise the little finger to notion that a trip to rest room is being considered. We close all fingers and raise fore and middle fingers to indicate that a trip to toilet is forewarned. Westerners perform the same gesture to indicate victory (as in V). What a stark contrast?

We had a friend who was mad after a girl in our class. We were all happy that at least one among us was bold enough to express his feelings for that girl. So, we kept on pumping him and ultimately made him to propose to her. To his luck, our man was successful and they started going steady. One fine day he came back to hostel after watching a movie with his sweetheart and announced with a major excitement "Oye yaar, My girlfriend fingered me today yaar". We were totally speechless. We started wondering how a small town girl could get so bold as to finger our man on the second or third meeting itself. Only I guessed what our friend was trying to convey. She ran her fingers through his beautiful mop of curly hair, which was naturally just irresistible. I could guess it because when this very man had come with a rough draft of his first love letter he had written "I make love to you" and wanted to mean, "I love you". We believe in word to word translation, right?

My dad is another person whose finger signals, many times, confuse strangers. He is one of those who believe in the quote "Silence is golden". So when is under the spell of that quote he primarily uses finger signals to answer almost all questions. So, if he just raised two fingers and held it static, away from the head, then it meant he was planning a trip to toilet. If the same configuration was used with swirling movement all around the head then it meant going to get a hair cut. Vague but true.

Our friends working on UNIX say they finger each other very often. They mean they check if their friend is logged onto his system. So, can we finger on Windows as well? Probably we can do virtual fingering by using a web camera where in you can literally finger yourself and say that you intend to do all that to the other party. This is the reason probably why people are not interested in chatting with the people who do not have a web camera.

Once upon a time, blatant lies were referred to as square tablets (a.k.a. chowk gulgi). This is because square tablets when rolled will topple and fall face down. Likewise, plain lies when tried will just fall flat. So, when our NCC teacher told that he would make everyone to take a flight on a glider in Sambra airbase, we knew it was a square tablet. We could not have exchanged this information among ourselves verbally and had to resort to hand signals once again. Fingers came in handy as usual. Extend forefinger and middle finger of both hands at angle of 30 degrees. Hold the extended fingers of the left hand horizontally and of the right hand vertically. Carefully place the vertical set over the horizontal set of fingers and you can get a near perfect square of uncovered area by this superimposition. What an ingenuity? So, then on, whenever we wanted to let others know that a person was trying to roll square tablets we used this with out fail. Chowk?

We had a classmate who had come down from Poona or somewhere and he used to raise his hand like others to let the teachers know that he wanted to answer a question but also used to hold only the forefinger extended for some reason. Force of habit? Who knows? Good that our teachers did not know what a raised single forefinger meant in the American terminology!

Want to tease somebody? Then curl your forefinger and rapidly change the curvature of the curl. This is popularly used when you want to tease somebody on food related matters.

Petty fights used to be common in schools. So, we were always searching for better techniques to maximize the impact out of fists. One technique was to extend the thumb out of the fist and put some wet of your tongue on the tip of the extend thumb and then punch the fist in your opponent’s tummy. Extended thumb out of the fist was supposed to add extra power to the blow. Try it out, of course, not on me please!

Fingers find reference to some vegetables as well. Like ladies finger, which becomes okra in USA. Finger chips likewise become French fries. Sometimes, a slip of tongue can make it finger fries.

Sometimes overzealous English enthusiasts can create havoc about fingers. If you have ever got a haircut in Dharwad, you must have seen people asking the barber to give them associated services like a head massage, clipping the finger nails, toe nails and of course most famous armpit service. Barbers used to offer them gladly. Try it elsewhere and you would have to cough up more for this haircut+(yes, haircut plus) service. So, once a barber, who claims to have given services to many British officers in Raj days, was asking the customer if he wanted finger cutting. He meant nail cutting.

In schools, Sanskrit could be written in Kannada or English but not in Sanskrit. May be funny but that used to be the case. So, we had a Sanskrit teacher who was a real scholar but did not know English as he studied mainly in traditional Sanskrit schools of Udupi and Tirupathi. So, he was alleged to have used a popular finger oriented measure of Genu to award marks while evaluating answers written in English. One Genu of writing fetched you one mark out of the five marks for an essay type question. Answers exceeding five genus were penalized for being too long getting close to another body measure moLa (one arm length).

So, let us start a new movement of literature where fingers are praised like other body parts as done by Kalidasa and others.

Till then do take good care of your fingers. Oil of Olay can help.

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