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i read somewhere that the average American has a vocabulary of 5000 words...he or she can happily go through life with that repertoire without being challenged by a need to find a new word to describe something.
i find that scary.
i know much fewer than 5000 words in my native language (which is odiya) and whenever i go home i realize how limited that is when i want to communicate with people outside my social circle.
i find that terrifying. compound that a thousand times over, a million times over with the fact that i am no different from the greater majority of people similar to me and well...
why am i petrified of this fact? its not like i or the others i think are similar to me want for a method or language to communicate. we usually know languages over and above the ones our great grandparents knew and if ever we lack for description in any language, we throw in one or two in to reinforce, reiterate and basically get our point through.
i am terrified for what i am losing in translation. translation of the hopes, fears and memories of generations before me to the ones after me. translation of the sights, smells and noises that were and that are. translations of the labour performed by nondescript heroes, forgotten and unsung, even unrecognised as anything but ordinary, in building today's generations and the dreams of tomorrow's children.
my thought, my actions, my dreams are different from my father's and my mother's. but surely there is something i can carry over, surely there is something that they did to make me who i am, the words i say, the things i do, and the things i do not say or do. for better or for worse, that surely is a great part of who i am and something i can and will treasure like the chingudi bhajaa my mother cooks for me.
why language? because when a child comes into this world, the first time he takes his place among us as a person is when he calls out 'ma' or 'baba' or 'bhai' or 'dei'. it therefore is the stepping stone and ultimately a window to who we are. i say 'mummy' when i usually call out to my mother and there are times when i say 'ma' instead when i'm talking about her in odiya to someone just because 'mummy' sounds irreconcilably alien and if i were to say that, i am subconciously aware that the intimacy of that conversation will be irrevocably lost. a sudden alienation born.
i always wanted to learn french because i thought it was a beautiful language. closer to home, i always found bengali langurously sweet. my own language, odiya, i never learnt to read or write because of a stubborn (one quality i showed very early signs of) resistance to any 'learning' over and above i had to do in school. as i grew up, i had english, hindi and sanskrit to take care of, particularly hindi which single handedly massacred my exam score averages through many an academic season. all the odiya i knew, i knew from talking to (and getting a talking to from) my parents and siblings and a long time later in college from conversing with friends. so in essence my knowledge of odiya remained very functional - never beautiful, and i think the biggest reason why in my urges to learn new languages, my own language never figured, ever.
as the subliminal battle goes on between the urge to be synchronously similar in cosmopolitan correctness, and the need to be uniquely identifiable - all i know in my heart is that when a language dies, inevitably a people are lost. i want to learn my mother tongue. i want to know odiya like and as an oriya.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Saturday, May 27, 2006
the fury of natural order spurned
It defies logic and all good reason to equate "progressiveness" with choosing 'right by birth' over true individual merit. In their infinite wisdom, the politicos of our nation ('visionary politicians' are a near-extinct species in India) want to use the cart as a plough instead of creating a plough. How in the world can anyone justify a legalised 'eye for an eye' (outside of some of our socially challenged neighbours in the middle east), if the case being made out is that of providing a historically oppressed section of the society a legal claim to an opportunity when it has no linkage to natural right of merit because the 'oppressor' section has had it good so far? Thats like handing the progeny of holocaust survivors a ticket to germany, a gun and a license to kill descendants of members of the Nazi Party of Germany because the latter institutionalized and industrialized the genocide of the former at some point of time in history. Too farfetched a comparison? maybe...surely not a farfetched analogy...
If logic defies us, then at least we can borrow on the foresight of leaders who wrought our constitution. If Ambedkar (and surely few would qualify as better or more deserved champions of social justice), in the chaotic new-gained freedom era, had the wisdom to suggest that 'reservations' are a short cut to social justice and bound to be harmful to the society on the whole in the long run, then surely he had something in mind!
Votebank politicians cannot see that of course. Blinded by a hunger for 'satta' since that is the only way they can redeem their existence having realised a long time ago that 'statemanship' is difficult to spell let alone be attained, these leaders of hyperbole and rhetoric want the easiest way to power which comes by the way of arthimetic majorities of the votebanks. They have even borrowed (original thought does not behove them) the term 'affirmative action' from the US example of voluntary action to social equality for all. If our self-styled social champions had bothered to look closer, they would perhaps understood (that not being a strong point of theirs) that the essence of 'affirmative action' was in disregarding the biases that are generated by class, colour and creed, and most certainly not a free meal ticket for some sections of the society. The pseodu-socialists in Congress, having not gained any wisdom whatsoever in their near-failure pseudo-socialist experiments, now want to try a different way to the doom they had just managed to avoid in the late 80s. Working with the desi Socialists/marxists (could that match have been made in heaven?) they want to create a new caste structure, that of the reserved and the general, caste having worked for the privileged sections in our country for more than five millenia- what could be any better path to power? That it has to come from people who lay claim to socialism and marxism, the movement of 'equal men', is surely the unkindest cut..
Its very simple, the guy (rich or poor, lower, middle or upper caste) who does not find a place for his merit in the natural order of things would move to somewhere he can. Get ready India for the 2nd wave of 'brain drain'.
Our Motto - We love to keep our country poor - in social & economic development and in the quality of people we have lead and build our nation!
an eye for an eye would leave the world blind. do not know about the rest of the world but it would surely blind our nation and that is a just fate for having allowed ourselves to being led by the visionary impaired...
If logic defies us, then at least we can borrow on the foresight of leaders who wrought our constitution. If Ambedkar (and surely few would qualify as better or more deserved champions of social justice), in the chaotic new-gained freedom era, had the wisdom to suggest that 'reservations' are a short cut to social justice and bound to be harmful to the society on the whole in the long run, then surely he had something in mind!
Votebank politicians cannot see that of course. Blinded by a hunger for 'satta' since that is the only way they can redeem their existence having realised a long time ago that 'statemanship' is difficult to spell let alone be attained, these leaders of hyperbole and rhetoric want the easiest way to power which comes by the way of arthimetic majorities of the votebanks. They have even borrowed (original thought does not behove them) the term 'affirmative action' from the US example of voluntary action to social equality for all. If our self-styled social champions had bothered to look closer, they would perhaps understood (that not being a strong point of theirs) that the essence of 'affirmative action' was in disregarding the biases that are generated by class, colour and creed, and most certainly not a free meal ticket for some sections of the society. The pseodu-socialists in Congress, having not gained any wisdom whatsoever in their near-failure pseudo-socialist experiments, now want to try a different way to the doom they had just managed to avoid in the late 80s. Working with the desi Socialists/marxists (could that match have been made in heaven?) they want to create a new caste structure, that of the reserved and the general, caste having worked for the privileged sections in our country for more than five millenia- what could be any better path to power? That it has to come from people who lay claim to socialism and marxism, the movement of 'equal men', is surely the unkindest cut..
Its very simple, the guy (rich or poor, lower, middle or upper caste) who does not find a place for his merit in the natural order of things would move to somewhere he can. Get ready India for the 2nd wave of 'brain drain'.
Our Motto - We love to keep our country poor - in social & economic development and in the quality of people we have lead and build our nation!
an eye for an eye would leave the world blind. do not know about the rest of the world but it would surely blind our nation and that is a just fate for having allowed ourselves to being led by the visionary impaired...
Tuesday, May 09, 2006
what is it about these worlds where space and time are irrelevant
and the emotions are raw, and in primary colours
where the earth, if its earth, stretches as far as you want it to
and not held within the limitedness of reality
where the heroes are heroes indeed
and where the darkest villains inspire awe; the flawed, admiration
all, that appeals to the heart and heart alone
and imagination, if freed from the mind
may such worlds live again
and again
[to the men and women, beasts and creatures, heroes and arch villains that inhabit the worlds of tolkien and his ilk]
and the emotions are raw, and in primary colours
where the earth, if its earth, stretches as far as you want it to
and not held within the limitedness of reality
where the heroes are heroes indeed
and where the darkest villains inspire awe; the flawed, admiration
all, that appeals to the heart and heart alone
and imagination, if freed from the mind
may such worlds live again
and again
[to the men and women, beasts and creatures, heroes and arch villains that inhabit the worlds of tolkien and his ilk]
Friday, May 05, 2006
motive
i sat down to write this something about motive and then it became a little foggy but i hope it comes back as i go clickety clack...
i'm a fan of legal shows on TV like Law & Order...Court TV...i like John Grisham...you get the drift. and the one thing i really appreciate is how the Assistant District Attorney always asks...ok...you got the evidence, but you still got to give me the motive...
and its interesting because i grew up on hindi cinema and zee & sony tv shows where you were guilty if the evidence was unimpeachable...or close enough...all right! at least admissible...
i say its interesting not because jurisprudence (i love this word by the way) seems more complete and more logical...'guilty beyond doubt' seems more right this way, but because its so much more vital i would think in the little wrongs and mistakes that happen on the mondays and tuesdays and the rest of the everydays...
a wrong and a mistake...one sparks off misgivings, the other sympathy...empathy. but how much of a difference does really exist between the two ? i could run over someone (touchwood!) round a blind corner someday or i could take a howitzer and fire it at some despicable politician i know from about six feet away (its funny how politicians are a really handy metaphor for just about every sleazy bad thing you want to describe)...the point is in both cases the 'victim' is probably grievously injured or (heaven help!) dead (in at least one of the cases i would fire the howitzer again) AND if you roll the whole thing back in ultra slow motion flashback with the action and resultant reaction, tell me what is it that you will find different? nothing! nothing observable to the naked eye that is, but most of us also instinctively realize that there IS a difference between an 'accident' and 'premeditated harm'...
that was the preamble. my point or the point of what i was thinking before i lost it for a while back there is that in the everyday mistakes and wrongs that we do and have done to us, 'motive' is so supremely important in all the ways it affects us. no one will sentence me to do time in ultra security because i told a lie or because i betrayed someone's trust but the knowledge of why i did what i did will decide whether i keep or lose that someone's trust. Genuine mistakes, and mind you most of us have a primeval atavistic instinct for what is genuine and what is not, may find forgiveness in time. However, deliberate 'motivated' wrongs seldom dispel the pall of mistrust and wronged indignance through life (the american penal description of it as opposed to the indian penal one)
which is also why in my mind it is really really important to understand why someone does that to you in the times that you are at the receiving end. how many mistakes are strewn across the history of our own lives which we carried with us as wrongs? how many times we have rebuffed genuine attempts to explain because we stood overwhelmed with the 'evidence' we could SEE or HEAR? if these were 'small' incidents, then sometimes...sometimes we would forget and even possibly forgive but even then things are never the same again.
my last thought on 'motive' is its weave with 'context'. the relativity of time..culture..geography, even the secure wrap of different childhoods creates so many different planes of 'context' that motives acquire very different hues...
is that getting back to sqaure one? i do not know...but maybe if i or you just pause a moment to ponder this before we judge an action next time then we are already doing better...aren't we?
i'm a fan of legal shows on TV like Law & Order...Court TV...i like John Grisham...you get the drift. and the one thing i really appreciate is how the Assistant District Attorney always asks...ok...you got the evidence, but you still got to give me the motive...
and its interesting because i grew up on hindi cinema and zee & sony tv shows where you were guilty if the evidence was unimpeachable...or close enough...all right! at least admissible...
i say its interesting not because jurisprudence (i love this word by the way) seems more complete and more logical...'guilty beyond doubt' seems more right this way, but because its so much more vital i would think in the little wrongs and mistakes that happen on the mondays and tuesdays and the rest of the everydays...
a wrong and a mistake...one sparks off misgivings, the other sympathy...empathy. but how much of a difference does really exist between the two ? i could run over someone (touchwood!) round a blind corner someday or i could take a howitzer and fire it at some despicable politician i know from about six feet away (its funny how politicians are a really handy metaphor for just about every sleazy bad thing you want to describe)...the point is in both cases the 'victim' is probably grievously injured or (heaven help!) dead (in at least one of the cases i would fire the howitzer again) AND if you roll the whole thing back in ultra slow motion flashback with the action and resultant reaction, tell me what is it that you will find different? nothing! nothing observable to the naked eye that is, but most of us also instinctively realize that there IS a difference between an 'accident' and 'premeditated harm'...
that was the preamble. my point or the point of what i was thinking before i lost it for a while back there is that in the everyday mistakes and wrongs that we do and have done to us, 'motive' is so supremely important in all the ways it affects us. no one will sentence me to do time in ultra security because i told a lie or because i betrayed someone's trust but the knowledge of why i did what i did will decide whether i keep or lose that someone's trust. Genuine mistakes, and mind you most of us have a primeval atavistic instinct for what is genuine and what is not, may find forgiveness in time. However, deliberate 'motivated' wrongs seldom dispel the pall of mistrust and wronged indignance through life (the american penal description of it as opposed to the indian penal one)
which is also why in my mind it is really really important to understand why someone does that to you in the times that you are at the receiving end. how many mistakes are strewn across the history of our own lives which we carried with us as wrongs? how many times we have rebuffed genuine attempts to explain because we stood overwhelmed with the 'evidence' we could SEE or HEAR? if these were 'small' incidents, then sometimes...sometimes we would forget and even possibly forgive but even then things are never the same again.
my last thought on 'motive' is its weave with 'context'. the relativity of time..culture..geography, even the secure wrap of different childhoods creates so many different planes of 'context' that motives acquire very different hues...
is that getting back to sqaure one? i do not know...but maybe if i or you just pause a moment to ponder this before we judge an action next time then we are already doing better...aren't we?
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