Systemic failure: callous disregard

Slowly ever so slowly, over the last few years it has been dying a slow and painful, though sometimes almost hilarious, death. How could death and humour go hand in hand? Strange bedfellows would be an apt way to describe it.  

Change is a part of life, one is told, there has to be a passing over, the cycle must be completed, one often hears. Hence what is, wasn’t so before, what will be, is not what it is right now or what it is supposed to transform into! The situation in question is baffling, intriguing, consternation-riddling and incomprehensible, to say the least.

How then, just how does one see something go before one's very own eyes? Sometimes it is a murder, sometimes it is a self-destructive, callous and very strangely egotistic suicide. Sometimes it is due to a systemic spread almost akin to a cancer, where one rogue cell finds its way slowly, but surely into almost every healthy cell, fanned by the mediocre but potently artificial diet of junk food and steroids, it thrives; Killing in the process the good cells, annihilating in their growth the essence, not allowing the good cells to even grow, forget thrive.

Similar is the case with language. We had adopted the Queen’s English for several historically poignant reasons, but just a sample of what has happened to it over the years:

…a leading troop of Europe to perform in the capital; Oh Lord, have mercy, it is troupe…

…several people have been affected and are reeling under the magnanimity of the earthquake…oops dear God…it should be magnitude of the earthquake. …Now you needn’t go to Goa to let your hairs down, you could let your hairs down right here in your own city…always thought that hair was hair, in singular and plural.

…The building collapse was caused due to lose earth; then pray did I loose the point or did I just loose my mind…?

…The person present their gave an eye witness account…pray then what were you doing there, and how can an eye witness account be given without a person being present? Now isn’t this a sample of a hilarious death.

These are not examples from an eight year kid’s English notebook, but are bloopers found in news reports, from leading newspapers of the country. One wonders then should kids be asked to read newspapers to better their language? Obviously there is not much else they are learning from them otherwise either.

What is worse it has crept into schools too; where there is scant regard for the nuances of language under the pretext that there is so much more to do. So at the end of a so called accomplished teaching-learning a child is still on a wavering ground, bereft of the right vocabulary to elucidate, expand or describe themselves or what they need done or want to do. They bumble around for the rest of their lives, hugely handicapped by this limited exposure to language. Compounding the situation is the fact that they end up being neither adept at their own mother tongue nor at the language widely adopted today.

It is often said if one wants to slowly kill a culture; first and foremost the language defining it must be eradicated. Language, food, culture all not necessarily, in that order, help in connecting. Once you connect any and everything thrives, spreads and creates variations along the way. But once a connection is severed it leads to mistrust and chaos. Language defines people in a very strange way; in fact it describes them in more ways than one. Of course, it is supposed to change and it is dynamic and relative and all the other blabber that surrounds it, but change in this manner?

We have examples of this in the recent past too where a beautiful language, Hindustani, as it was called back then, an amalgamation of Urdu, Hindi, Farsi was systematically phased out of the country after partition, with it now being found only in tiny niches and ghettos. Or it hangs in there, ever so gingerly in the hearts and minds of those who experienced a different era and can still read write and converse in it and in those brief moments, relive a lifetime of memories and lifestyle. This not only allowed them to be global citizens in their own right back then, but it also allowed them a peek into the lives and times of great writers, philosophers, peers and fakirs, where they were not dependent on the bland transliteration and translation that often is the case.   

An entire generation of children and their children have been deprived of the beauty of one the finest languages and unfortunately it has been used as a subtle weapon to divide rather than unite. In the same way instead of adding on to the magnificence that is inherent in almost each language we are slowly and surely killing the threads that bind, snipping out the threads that connect...

©Copyright Suverchala Kashyap