the origin of baguth

Whenever you cram hundreds of restless college students with fertile imaginations together into close proximity, you are sowing the seeds for creating a rich dialect. BITS Pilani was no different. Thanks to the fact that students came from all parts of the country speaking a cacophony of different languages, it was inevitable that linguistic cross-pollination will occur.

To an outsider, seeing a Kashmiri guy addressing his close friend as machan or a Telugu guy using the choicest Ghati swear words or a Tamil guy applauding a Sachin shot as khoobsurat will create cognitive dissonance. I, for one, was totally confused in my first month in Pilani. Inspite of the constant fear of getting ragged, I was amused to see the linguistic contraptions of my seniors and would burst out giggling in front of them. Creating new words and phrases for describing the mundane events of BITSian life seemed to be one of the favorite pastimes on campus.

The prime examples of such phrases were the ones that were used to denote each other's linguistic origins. North Indians were referred to as Choms. Chom is allegedly a village in Bihar that boasts of 100% illiteracy. Tamilians were referred to as Illads. Apparently, the Tamil word that most registers in the ears of non-Tamil students was 'illai-da'. Telugu guys were referred to as Gults - the short form of 'gu-lu-te' which was the reverse of 'te-lu-gu'. When you see the fervor with each linguistic group admires the BITSian name given for them, you will realize why Gandhi suggested that India should be demarcated along linguistic lines.

This sets up the context for the origin of 'baguth'. Each group of BITSians had their own system for rating jokes cracked by a member. There was the ever-popular 'Choice A-B-C-D' system. A, B and C were given on the usual merit basis. Choice D had the special meaning - "I'm laughing only because you are my friend and I don't want to lower the gang's respect in front of the people from other gangs".

In SpiceTooth's wing (he was one year junior to ChennaiToChicago and me), reviews were quick and brutal. Good jokes were applauded and recounted to other gangs in the mess. Bad jokes were dismissed with a variety of renditions of the word 'bad'. Silly bad jokes were dealt with a quick, surgical 'bad joke'. Atrociously bad jokes got the sheep-bleat-like verbally stretched-out response - 'baaaaaaeeeeeeeddd joke'. There was a guy called 'Kaathu' Sivaraman, who came up with the idea of attaching a new Hindi word he learnt to 'bad'. The Hindi word was obviously 'baguth'.

For painfully thin guys like Kaathu, who couldn't endure the windpipe-taxing extremes of 'baaaaaaaaaeeedddddd', 'baguth bad' became a verbal shortcut. Over time, just the word 'baguth' was used to crush the hopes of the next Vivek-wannabe in the gang. Over some more time, 'baguth' came to be used to denote extremely bad judgement in other areas of a guy's behaviour.

We will have to thank SpiceTooth for bringing this word from Pilani to Chicago, as a legacy of his BITSian days. I'm sure that this not the end of the journey for this potent word. It will manifest itself in various forms and social settings. Heck, it might even get its own wikipedia entry. But I sincerely hope that no one from this gang names any offspring as 'baguth' however ugly the baby turns out to be. That will be truly 'baaaaaaaeeeedddd' behaviour.