The Hindu Business Line : <I>The campaign for clarity </I>

Most of us know well the peculiarly stilted and lifeless language used in our daily newspapers, which is the combined result of a Victorian educational curriculum and an East India company clerk's vocabulary, teeming with ancient idioms, abstraction and circumlocution. We listen to modern but equally ponderous, and often silly, gobbledygook on television. And, yet, most people remain unconcerned by this, while some develop an inverted snobbery and pride about not speaking or writing a foreign language sensibly.

The pity is that even the nationalistic champions of Indian languages do not realise how much the modern forms of our languages are literal translations of English clichés and jargon, which have eroded the ordinary speech of, say, Tamil or Hindi. All you have to do is to listen to the Hindi newscasts and see how much they operate with stock phrases similar to the English ones, which require that every emergency the minister "air dashes" to the site, and after every heavy rain "the city limps back to normalcy" — to pick just two among thousands of formula expressions.

Purpose of language

Lively, vivid and human language is fast disappearing and, in some cases, replaced by such non-communication as: "What is your take on the upside in the markets and the infrastructure space, going forward?" and "What strategies do you have put in place, Minister, to meet this entire situation on-the-ground?" These sentences came from someone who is a stranger to the idea that the purpose of language is understanding. He simply could not be bothered with the listener being part of his conversation, nor wait to catch his breath. He just had to pump empty words into the air like a machine gun.

The flavour of the month

Yet, never was clear English such a high priority as now. Our much-touted language skills, supposedly our competitive advantage in the world market, depends on it. Literacy is on the increase, and the growth of media is accelerating over the past decade in India, thanks to the enormous popularity of mobile communication and satellite TV. The meeting points of the ordinary citizen with arms of the government in public life are growing, which will be more so if the Right to Information Act is properly implemented. More of our everyday lives are regulated with new forms of regulatory mechanisms and the intrusive and ubiquitous advertising, journalism and TV debates. As an investment destination, India is, to use a typical buzzword, `the flavour of the month'! We have a head-start on every other developing country outside the subcontinent, in our familiarity if not facility with the English language.

For all these reasons, Mr Jyoti Sanyal's campaign for clear English, launched formally along with a few of his like-minded friends out of Calcutta last year, has come not a day too soon. He has had a long career with The Statesman of Calcutta and wrote its style guide, apparently the first and only one of its kind in Indian journalism. He has added fuel to his campaign with a book that is at once both instructive and hilarious, called Indlish. Both the book and the movement deserve time from every Indian who would like to speak English sensibly and clearly. The campaign for use of a simple, clear and direct style of writing English both in the business world and government merits mass support.

S. Ramachander