Mind Your Language

I have always had respect for languages. I guess that is why I used to pass most of the language papers with flying colours in school. Being the son of a literature graduate and a poet, that was the least I could have done.

It was only recently that I realized how far have I come from the school boy who wrote 'Wren & Martin' english, superb hindi and could write sanskrit with lesser mistakes than most of the guys of his age. Nine years since, every now and then, I find myself struggling for minutes to think of the hindi translations of most english words, with a shamefully low success rate. Ashamed of my lingual state, I started to use hindi words in daily conversations, only to see the clueless expressions of the listeners. Soon after, disgusted by the level of hindi that people of my generation can understand, I shared my pain with a friend whose knowledge of hindi has always made me bow. He was the only one who could possibly understand my agony as I witness the slow and painful death of my mother tongue. Together, we discussed my concern over this unfortunate state of the language, looking for people or things to blame.

We were not sure if we could blame the educational institutions, every board has hindi as a subject after all. May be its the parents who have gone berserk over their kids' spoken english (nobody bothers if the little devils can write properly). The result is a bunch of jack-of-all student, who sucks at hindi and is a little more than satisfactory at english. My second concern was that umpteen number of Urdu words have polluted hindi (no offences to urdu speakers). Urdu has gelled in so well with hindi that most 'jack-of-all's can hardly tell the difference. My friend blamed this entirely on Bollywood. And I think it is justified, urdu is undoubtedly the most romantic language. I mean, imagine a bollywood song in pure hindi, it will sound more like a shloka than a song. Come to think of it, even Hollywood is doing its part in degrading the level of english. And so we have a mix of American, British and ebonics accents here.

After we were done with blaming, we chatted in hindi to contribute to the noble cause of saving a language from extinction (or at least delaying the extinction). I also decided to speak hindi more often, and guess what...it works better than urdu to flirt ;-)