Another tearful reunion with the television after a long time.
This time it was not because of the absence of a television at the hotel that I stayed in, it was more of a content based longing. When everything is either in French or Norwegian or Swedish, and there is no nude womans on TV, its really not worth watching.
Hence when I got back to bachelor pad (home will forever be in Mysore, bachelor pad is my apartment), I skimmed through the television channels to see that everything was intact and was glad to notice that the content did not leave a lot to be desired for.
The first ever news segment that I saw after getting back pissed me off no end. It was related to some arbit general comment made by the higher education minister of Karnataka who came up with a comment saying that Tipu Sultan’s name should be scrapped off the NCERT history books because he is ‘anti-Kannadiga’.
He apparently wanted the official language of the then Mysore-state court to be Persian as opposed to Kannada. He also had coins minted only in the Persian language.
Now, our higher education minister needs some education. So what if Tipu Sultan was what he was?
We spend too much time looking back over our shoulders, thinking of all the byegones and has-beens, instead of looking at history from an unbiased perspective and reporting it to the kids who are (under normal circumstances) usually reluctant to know lots and generally mug it up and spew it on their answer papers.
That is one of the many problems facing our country. Too much footage for too many irrelevant people who want their 15 minutes.
Why can’t we all just learn pertinent things from the past and look ahead instead?
If what I have read what he said, quoted verbatim, in Vijaya Karnataka then he is not guilty of making vague and stupid comments.
1. He said inane hero worship should be stopped and calling Tipu a national hero is foolish because it is highly subjective.
There are so many instances of cruel blunders committed by him.
2. The subject about him being anti-kannada, was regarding non-standard legal language used in Kannada.
He said Tipu himself never encouraged Kannada, though it was the language of >90% of people he ruled but, today’s legalese in Kannada has mostly words from Persian, Tipu’s mother tongue, and (his) problem does not end there; the legal language used in Hyderabad-Karnataka though having largely Persian words, have a different meaning to the very same words used in legal language of the Old Mysore region!
The most widely used(pr baly the only existant) legal language books are from North Karnataka and we are in a situation where students schooled in that are being retrained again in the other version of the language in the course of their profession.
The result is that legal language(though ambiguous to laymen, it is a sort of a cryptic code
has to be logical and precise by nature and when a case comes from northern part of Karnataka to the High Court, just imagine the plight of clerks, lawyers, advocates and the transcribers!
He asked for standardising the legal language, I don’t see an iota of malice in that “demand”!