Mourning the desecration of a great language, again

When you watch any video on YouTube these days, you are sure to be accosted by an advertisement of an app called Grammarly which very aggressively insists that you need to know and write correct English in order to make a good impression on everybody around you who matters. And that is precisely what I have been trying to teach a lot of people all my life. I don’t think I have had much success.

English has, as everybody knows, spread far wider and deeper in India after the sahibs left. We are often called the third largest English speaking country in the world, and given the speed with which the use of the language is spreading coupled with the sheer size of our population, the time may not be too far off when Englishmen and Americans and Canadians and Australians who hiccup or wince to read or hear ‘our kind of English’ will have to accept, however ruefully, that that is the kind of English they will have to live with hereafter, every great user of yore from Shakespeare through Abraham Lincoln and Wodehouse and Hemingway and Jawaharlal Nehru be damned.

Now as I have often said, I am not a rigid purist; I have always known and been comfortable with the idea that a living language is a flowing, ever-changing thing like a river or a tree; that the writer of Beowulf would have been as uncomfortable with Shakespeare as Shakespeare with, say, J.K. Rowling, and I have absolutely no quarrel with the possibility that a genuine Indian English might be evolving: witness R.K. Narayan, Amitav Ghosh, Chitra Banerjee and Jhumpa Lahiri. What I cannot stomach is that so many Indians, including so many who firmly believe they are well-educated, mangle the language, spelling and grammar included (I shall not even begin to talk about pronunciation and accent), simply because they could never be bothered to learn Received English well. Consider the following (very small and unfinished-) list of the kind of expressions we use:

We are like that only.

Cousin brother, return back, repeat again.

Shifting houses, not moving.

One of my brother (not brothers).

Avoiding ‘the’ (‘PM says that…’, ‘Punjab is in turmoil’) where needed, and slipping it in where it makes no sense.

He told that/ He said me that…

Bunking classes (most Indians haven’t heard of ‘cutting’ them!).

Friend circle, head injury, chalk piece, spot dead.

I am having a child (and yet I am not in hospital!).

Going for shopping, regret for doing something.

Putting ‘but’ at the end of sentences: He is a good teacher but.

Doctor Vijay, Vijay Uncle.

Sir, I can tell the answer? (instead of ‘Can I …?’)

Comming, shinning, writting (come and see the homework books I correct to find out how common these spellings have become: the culprits in fact insist that many of their teachers spell that way!)

Catched and teached and striked (believe it or not).

Did not came, did not had (this is becoming near universal – these days I am pleasantly surprised when a pupil actually says or writes ‘did not come’)

No idea about the difference between ‘few’ and ‘a few’, ‘little’ and ‘a little’.

He suggested me to try that book/ He insisted me to go with him.

Using ‘society’ to mean ‘neighbourhood’: as in ‘there are a lot of stray dogs in our society’.

No idea about the difference between a flat and a block of flats.

He has got very less money (few Indians know any longer that ‘less’ is the comparative degree of the adjective little, and must be followed by ‘than something’).

More better, more cooler.

Number of ointment tubes in the carton: 20 nos. (why not just 20, for heaven’s sake? And how many even know or care that no. is not really the English diminutive for ‘number’, it derives from the French ‘numero’? Ask yourself, did you spend half a second in your entire student life wondering where the ‘o’ came from?)

Telecasted, forecasted (I read such words in our foremost national English dailies these days).

I could double the list without reflecting overmuch. It makes the likes of me cringe with shame and embarrassment. I quite understand that most of my readers are not likely to have such intense feelings: I happen to worship languages, and English in particular, so to me they are cardinal sins, like doodling a moustache and putting horns on a Venus de Milo. But my point is, those of us who think and say that ‘misunderstanding’ means a girl standing below because they are first generation learners who haven’t had the chance to learn enough may be forgiven, but should teachers and journalists with post-graduate degrees use the same excuse, and feel equally shameless?

I’ll add to this post in a day or two. Do come back to visit.

Five days in Bangalore

This trip to Bangalore was supposed to be unusual, in the sense that I was visiting primarily not to see the sights but to meet up with some eager old boys, and that is exactly how it worked out.

I arrived at the airport at about eight in the evening of Wednesday after half a day’s work in Kolkata. Subhadip and Kaustav, of the ICSE 2002 and 2012 batches respectively, turned up to receive me, and I was taken to the Treebo Hotel just behind Thalassery restaurant off Swamy Vivekananda Road near Hope Farms in Whitefield. Kaustav’s ‘PG’ is located in an adjacent street, and he had planned to stay with me for the course of my visit, looking forward to several long and leisurely chats, which we did enjoy.

Next morning the two of us visited Tipu’s palace halfway across the town, then strolled around Lal Bagh, as beautiful as it was in 1992, though the temperature shot up to 32 celsius, and the sun was blinding, as it had been at Pondicherry three years ago: so much for Bangalore’s balmy weather! Then we had a standard dosa-vada lunch at an Udupi eatery, and it was already late afternoon by the time we returned. A walk around a local lake to get away from the noise and dust for a bit, then a visit to Kaustav’s software park on ITPL Road, where I kept grinning to myself as the ‘high-tech’ entry procedure dragged on seemingly for ages, reminding me of Chaplin’s biting satire in Modern Times. Someone stole poor Kaustav’s spare helmet off his parked bike: future visitors from Durgapur beware.

On Friday Subhadip picked us up and we drove off to Mysore. The old capital is a much cleaner, quieter place. Did the customary tour of the Wodeyar Palace, followed by a trip to the Chamundi hills, which offered a pretty view of the city below after sundown. On Saturday we drove back at a more leisurely pace, stopping at Tipu’s summer palace first, then at the Ranganthittu bird sanctuary, which was delightful, a welcome drink of green coconut water in front of the Gumbaz and a quick peek at the stark hills near Ramnagara at Subhadip’s insistence, where most of Sholay is supposed to have been shot. It was 8:30 in the evening by the time we returned to the hotel, after negotiating several of Bangalore’s notorious traffic jams and stopping for tea, chicken samosa and elanji on the way. All three of us were dead beat by then. Subhadip hardly let me drive, ostensibly because he loves driving, but much more likely because he could not entrust his beloved car to me, or could not bear with my too-staid driving, or both.

Sunday was spent lazing. Abhishek Das of the 2003 batch came over to visit, as did Aritra Roy of 2007, and we chatted right till evening, breaking off only to lunch on Malabari biryani, though Kaustav took a half hour snooze, and I spent part of the late afternoon in a dream like state, lounging on the sofa and listening to the boys exchanging notes over their current job situations and lifestyle issues, interspersed with delightful reminiscences about their classes with me. At night, Subhadip ferried me to his flat and back, and we gorged on a sumptuous dinner rustled up by his wife and mother, eager hostesses despite all the varied pressure they are under.

On Monday I visited Nishant Kamath’s parents at their flat in a beautifully appointed gated residential housing complex off Budigere Cross. Seven hours passed by in a flash, chatting, drinking tea, coffee and a bit of wine, strolling around the  manicured campus, lunching on a mixture of cuisines, and learning about their joint cake-making venture which has become such a hit that they are having to refuse orders  now. Took a cab to Kempegowda Airport in the late afternoon for fear of getting caught up in a traffic snarl, then spent two interminable hours waiting to board the flight, which was mercifully on time despite an initial delay scare, and I was in Pupu’s house by 11:30 p.m. Delhi is much cooler and greener; the traffic, just as dense but considerably more orderly.  Being free (and guilt-free) to relax, I have stayed at home round the clock these last three days – except for brisk walks around the IIT/NCERT campuses or the Sarvodaya Enclave Park nearby – and finished a short history of Islam; currently deep into Wendy Doniger’s much reviled, but most erudite, monumental and highly readable ‘alternative history’ of Hinduism. Pupu’s bookshelves offer a delectable choice of books...

Thank you, all the boys. It was a pleasure. Now that I have a little more leisure to travel, if only in short snatches, I shall be glad to know which others might be equally eager to host me for a few days where they live. If there are good sightseeing options nearby, that would be a bonus, but I would like to visit essentially for the conversations. 

(Buddha carved out of a tree trunk, Lalbagh, Bangalore)

I might post other photos later.

Slowly letting go

I have been doing some spring cleaning, and dusting up very old books. A few of them were prizes for good performance that I had won in school – you know, ‘First in general proficiency’, that sort of thing – including the very first one, Simple Simon Rhymes, awarded at the end of kindergarten, which is now so tattered and run through and through with book lice and silver fish that it is falling apart, and I had to throw it away at last, after hanging on to it for a full fifty years, though it was a terrible wrench (I can still recite some of those rhymes from memory. I especially loved the one with the picture of a child in a dunce's cap complaining Multiplication is vexation, and division is as bad/ the rule of three perplexes me, and practice drives me mad). Thus we slowly get over our deepest attachments as the Shadow looms ever larger. I wrote about this in March 2013, and seven years have gone since then.

I also came across an old notepad in which I had made a single entry. It is headed Friday, 17^th August 2007, 1:50 p.m., Cabin 11, Durgapur Steel Plant Hospital. I was there because I needed to have an emergency appendectomy. I had been in excruciating pain for the last three days, but that day, relaxing after a very light lunch and the dextrose drip going, I had eased up a bit, enough at least to scribble a few lines. I had the operation that night, and in the long run, it turned out, it was far from perfect: a nerve along the right leg was permanently damaged. Anyway, as the poet said, I don’t ask to be spared from pain and sorrow, just see to it that I can bear it…

দুঃখতাপে ব্যথিতচিতে নাই বা দিলে সান্ত্বনা,

সহিতে পারি এমনি যেন রয়।  

Even back then, I was a very tired man, so bone-weary at times that a sudden break for hospitalization was halfway welcome: I could cry off work for a bit without a guilty conscience. But this is the last line I wrote in that entry – ‘Getting an enforced rest! God grant that it won’t happen again too soon (it did, but only in 2015). Pupu’s still too young: I need to soldier on for another ten years at least’. Fun fact: some people who absolutely love me, I discovered afterwards, had spread it around that I had had a heart attack!

So anyway, another twelve years have now passed, and I have been soldiering on, as forever. What happens now?

Pupils who remember with respect

When you have been teaching for as long as I have, nothing warms the cockles of your heart as much old boys and girls thanking you and recounting things that they have held dear for decades.

So I am absolutely thrilled and delighted to report two wonderful things that have happened over the last three days:

Saikat Chakraborty, who has been working on a way to mimic photosynthesis (or, more accurately, photocatalysis) to use widely available and economically viable materials to produce hydrogen from water – to be used as a clean and endlessly available fuel for the future – has just submitted his PhD thesis for evaluation halfway around the world and dedicated it to me. I’m not sure, but even the quote from Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, ‘Water will be the coal of the future’, might owe a bit to something I might have said in class long, long ago.

And two nights ago, the mother of one of my current pupils told me why she has sent her daughter to my tuition: for something far beyond getting a good score in board exams – 'Sir, I remember how you scribbled ‘tin, tap, toy, toll, tax’ on the board and made us repeat the right pronunciation, not the hard t-s of Indian languages but the correct soft t of English'. I myself had learnt that in class 7 from my then English teacher Diana Mukherjee – an Englishwoman who had married a Bengali – and have been passing it on to my pupils decade after decade, but this lady remembered it, right to the extent of the correct sequence of the five words I had listed, almost twenty five years ago! To say that I felt bliss would be a poor approximation of what I did feel.

The truth is, literally thousands of pupils have reason to be grateful, only not the capacity, the depth of mind to understand the value of what they were taught, nor the degree of civilization necessary to acknowledge the debt. Look up my old blogpost Ingratitude and karma. So Saikat and Tandrani, thank you from the bottom of an old teacher’s heart. Any spiteful, stupid and ignorant cretin can call you names: you have to be human to feel grateful.