Women Who Whistle

WWW – What is arguably the most common acronym for the World Wide Web, has another connotation for me.

I belong to that category of women – the ones that whistle. Hence the acronym – WWW – Women Who Whistle.

And it’s jolly good fun too.

I suppose the habit stuck to me while reading ‘Little Women’ – donkeys years back (might I add), when Jo (Josephine) is reprimanded for whistling, as it was boyish and unfeminine. Jo, the obstinate mule that she was, obviously stuck to her whistling routine, much to Meg’s annoyance.

There! I said it. I probably began whistling to annoy people.

Except that it turned out, many found it unusual / cool, and I often had requests for renditions of cat calls, loud whistles and the eternal favorite – whistling to popular Bollywood / Hollywood tracks. And since modesty is just not one of my virtues, let me add too that I am also pretty good at it still (Tilt of hat, victory bow.

Of course, there were the odd / exasperated looks I got from an entire class of aunts who tut-tutted and shook their heads in dismay, narrating stories of unladylike girls who whistled in gay abandonment. My refrain that some girls sang; my thing was whistling, didn’t really gather the endorsement I was hoping to garner. There were also constant references to that ancient poem which never failed to elicit a baleful look from me, going somewhat like this:

“A whistling maid and a crowing hen
are neither fit for God or men…”

Hearing the above was enough to make me pucker up and go into a five minute frenzy of whistling loudly, tunelessly (deliberate), accompanied by its equally cacophonic drumming of palms on any wooden surface. It sounded like a cageful of angry birds who were drumming for all their worth…Oh yeah, tit for tat was definitely in vogue back then…Pleas for putting an end to whistling fell on my intentionally deaf ears. The only thing that worked was being presented with a stick of gum or a candy bar, which seemed to do the trick – well at least for sometime…

I also bayed for anyone’s blood who proceeded to recite the following:

“Grandma told a curious thing
Boys must whistle, and girls must sing.”
Ha!

Eventually, I’ve turned out pretty fine…I can hear a multitude of aunts sighing with relief. I still whistle occasionally – I call them my happy tunes. I whistle ditties to children. I whistle in the shower (and drown out the sound of the pesky neighborhood kids who scream like banshees in the park while playing footie). I also whistle to my Labrador, who cocks his ear to one side and looks at me from the corner of his eye, a half-amused, droll expression plastered on his face. Whistling is severely underrated, I think. Perhaps it is the sheer knowledge that what one can whistle, the iPod can do a note-to-note perfect rendition…Maybe there ought to be a law making whistling compulsory at schools – like they do at La Gomera, a Spanish island where the government is trying to keep the national whistling language, el Silbo, alive...

A recent invite for an audition to the country’s premier whistling organization, was an honor...which unfortunately now has to be put aside for a later month, thanks to the cast on my leg. Drat! Just my luck!

But as is said, I’ll be back. Like the wind (pun intended)...