Let us look at another timeless muhavra, or idiom in Hindi, and learn its meaning in English.
पेट में चूहे दौड़ना
Transliteration of the above muhavra: Pet mein choohe daudna.
Literal translation: Rats running in my stomach.
Figurative meaning: Feeling very hungry (as Winnie the Pooh would say, “rumbly in my tumbly”).
Example of the idiom’s usage in a sentence:
सुनिये, shopping थोडा देर बाद करते हैं, पहले कुछ खा लेते हैं, already मेरे पेट में चूहे दौड़ने लगे हैं।
Transliteration of the above sentence: Suniye, shopping thoda daer baad karte hain; pehle kuch kha lete hain, already mere pet mein choohe daudne lage hain.
Translation and the figurative meaning of the above sentence: Listen, we will go shopping a little later; first, let us eat something, already I am feeling extremely hungry.)
Origins of this Hindi idiom
This is another example of a Hindi idiom that has existed since ancient times. When we feel hungry, our stomach rumbles, and it feels like rats are running around inside our stomachs, making us feel uneasy. The first time someone used these words to describe his hunger, the listeners would have found it very funny and dramatic. Since then, it has remained one of the most popular and colorful idioms in the Hindi language.
Spoken Hindi
In their daily casual conversation, people from India usually mix a few words of English with their Hindi, as we saw in the sample sentence above. This is quite normal. Attempting to use pure Hindi words in our day-to-day talk will make us seem strange and abnormal. This is true for most regional languages of India. English words are freely used while speaking Hindi, and those English words are sometimes also written in Hindi (or Devnagiri) script.
Looking forward . . .
I hope you were able to gain some knowledge about the Hindi idiom ‘Pet mein choohe daudna’ from this blog post.
If you have any questions, please feel free to write in the comments
section below. I will be happy to hear from you and to respond to you.
In the coming days and weeks, I will be posting similar articles on
other Hindi idioms, explaining their meanings in English, and I hope
many more non-Hindi speakers will benefit from my blog posts.