Rocking in the Free World

Just the other day, a friend of mine, the same guy who had put haircut on tuesday for me wanted me to write something in Hindi for his wife, to impress her and to kindle her romantic spirit.

How successful he would have been with his romantic enterprise, given the fact that she is eight and a half months pregnant and focussing only on being able to see her feet, is anybody’s guess. Here’s wishing him all the very best for life with his own kid.

Now the letter had to have each line put out three times – one with all the relevant lines in Hindi script, the second line with the phonetic Hindi pronunciation and the third with the actual translation of content into English.

Now, after writing stuff in April 1998 for my Hindi board exam, I have not written anything in Hindi, and having to write put me in a precarious predicament for a very short while.

After mulling over the whole thing for about 45 seconds, I found out, as usual, that it was somebody else’s fault and not my own. Turns out that my particular situation and that of possibly thousands of other donkeys who actually studied Hindi for 10 years in school was so bad because of the popular tendancy that people have of typing out even Hindi words in English. Nowadays, spoken Hindi is good enough so long as one is proficient in reading and writing English.

With the plethora of ‘Hinglish’ words and with the dilution of the language to an extent as is visible, it is no wonder that things are as bad as they are. Karan Johar and his new age metrosexual hippy movies are also equally responsible for having started the trend of anglicization of movie names and abbreviating them in a pseudo fashion.

Now people chat on yahoo messenger in Hindi using English. I was subjected to do it myself as a camaraderie buiding exercise with my teammate who was comfortable in anything but, and I felt lousy, but had to comply.

We have the Devnagri script for most of the languages with Aryan origins and scripts for all our local languages as well. Spoken proficiency is not sufficient if one intends to use it for other means of communication.

Hope we all can rise above this collective pathetic state of sadness to understand how dumb we actually are by doing whatever we’re doing.