National language, no national language

Uff took a 2-day long break. Was caught up with a bit of eye trouble. Now back with all the energy gained from Magi noodles and tomato ketchup.

(Not follow-on eye-trouble) Yesterday I happened to see and hear ONV in person and felt quite good about it. Didn’t know the great poet was also a great orator. It was so amazing to listen to his conversation flowing from one thought to another. Mm let me think… what did he talk about? Oh yeah, language. I didn’t think there was such a lot of meaning to language, culture and communication.

Anyway relating to that I decided to write about another language-trouble that comes as an oft-seen scenario in India. Problem is having numerous languages and bigger problem is each person not proficient in all. Both difficult to solve, says aspiring language-destroyers and language-learners. So the only answer is to somehow make one language common in all states. Hindi was the national language when I last checked. Pretty sure it still is, national languages have this habit of clinging on. National language however turned out to be full of words that sounded quite alien from other regional languages of the country. Somebody forgot to add the qualification that national language had to be an, everyone-knows-it language. It is not compulsory in all schools, and even if it is made so, there are multitudes who do not get education so they’d be left out of the common language speakers club.

English came a little bit to the rescue to the educated lot. Well to a tiny, little, miniscule bit. Ok you get the picture. It was no good at all. Person C went to another state to start new career. C knew mother-tongue and English, might even understand a little bit of Hindi. But that unfortunately seemed minutely little when she found the rest of the fellow-career-folks happily conversing in Hindi, during work hours and outside work hours. Left out, C tried several times to interject a cough and say “I don’t follow Hindi, could you guys talk in English?”. This was sometimes received with huge apologies and the accused switched to English. But that bit of courtesy was exceedingly short-lived. After a while they chose to be oblivious of C’s presence in the premises and C in turn decided to be an anti-social loner.

I have also seen national-language speaking person S come to Mallu-land and sit helplessly in the middle of an ocean of Mallu exchanges thrown over and under his head!

This is a pretty common scenario and no permanent solution has yet been found. I have decided to personally take it to be listed in the Constitution the moment one is found.