Is it?

All boxed up and ready to go. We have our fingers crossed that everything arrives as planned in Egypt at the end of August.

The house is just a shell now and so we popped along to the cinema to kill a couple of hours in the evening. 'New York' was the film of choice: a very entertaining Hindi film starring Irrfan (the super cool police inspector from Slumdog Millionaire) and involving some reasonably original ideas concerning terrorism and faith.

I found it interesting to listen to the language flit between English and Hindi all the time. Frequently, even sentences that began in English were finished in Hindi and vice-versa.

I read somewhere that 'Indian English' will be the mainstream language by 2050 due to the sheer amount of people speaking it. It has loads of little quirks like any variation of the English language and with five Indian colleagues, I can recognise a few. One of the more common variations is to change the order of the main pronoun in a sentence: "What you will do?" and "You are coming to lunch?" to give a couple of examples.

My favourite though is "is it?", a phrase used instead of "really?" which always brings a wry smile to my face.