Hmmm... I've finally decided to make another effort at blogging. Let me start by sharing my thoughts about one of my biggest irritants: Indian English, which is killing the language I love (English, duh).
I am appalled by the state of English in our country. Back in school days, I believed that the whole world save my Gujju medium schoolmates could speak decent English. But as I opened my ears to hear the real world, especially after college, I felt shocked. I can now see a systematic, wide-scale murder of my language.
We seem to have decided to simply ignore grammar. People who wish to refer to me with respect have pluralized me - "Parth are not coming to the movie." (Of course, here I refer to the fresh recruits who neither know me nor my real age behind the moustache.) We clearly do not know about the existence of the "perfect" tenses - we just keep language "simple" (pun intended, you dummies!). We Capitalize Any Letter that we find to be Important.
But of course, this does not keep people from claiming fluency in this language. I've seen countless resumes claiming English skills while not having a single error-free sentence. In fact, I am yet to see a single resume without a spelling mistake!
Speaking of spelling mistakes - I fill horified by dhe eaz weeth wich we mek them. There's this new guy who joined us in marketing yesterday - for some unexplainable reason, it occurred to me that I should write down some basic linguistic expectations from him, as he'll be communicating with our customers. Despite my ultra-clear instructions, I found five spelling mistakes in a three-sentence report he sent me today. And when I brought it up, he stared at me in a way that told me how foolish I was to treat those as mistakes!
We have lost the sense of perfection, especially in language. We have already doped our native languages with hundreds of English words that we cannot live without. If we cannot expect perfection in spellings, how on earth can we expect perfection in sentence formations, and further fine-tuning in even choosing the right means among several grammatically correct options?!
Unfortunately, there is not even any hope. While we ourselves do not even realize our mistakes, we no longer even have people around us, or teachers, to correct us. We dole out degrees like MA (English) without ensuring even the fluency of pre-school levels. And those among us (I claim myself to be one) who could claim decent fluency are also giving up, as we are forced to re-phrase our sentences to make sense to our listeners, and filter all but the simplest vocabulary, while being bombarded with poor English from all corners. As a result, our English is often a mere disorderly translation of sentences formed first in our native Indian language - hence full of passive voice, "respectful words", etc.
I put most of this blame on two categories of people - "urbanites" and "marketers". Urbanites, especially the so-called "professionals", have decided that their language of speech must be English. They try to express the world within their tiny vocabulary. And their most amusing aspect is their confidence - it often makes me literally speechless! The second class is the marketers, who, again, have decided that anything other than English is beneath their dignity. And therefore, these Englishmen torture their customers with not only their products, but even their language.
Any way, I guess I have rambled enough for today. I'm struggling to retain my remaining fluency. If one of you readers feels likewise, let me know, maybe we can figure a solution, or at least mourn together for the death of our dear language! (Or, you may simply help me by correct the mistakes in this blog...)
No comments:
Post a Comment