Hazy Angrezi
Bachi Karkaria's Erratica and its cheeky sign-off character, Alec Smart, have had a growing league of followers since 1994 when the column began in the Metropolis on Saturday. It now appears on the Edit Page of the Times of India, every Thursday. It takes a sly dig at whatever has inflated political/celebrity egos, and got public knickers in a twist that week. It makes you chuckle, think and marvel at the elasticity of the English language. It is a shooting-from-the-lip advice column to the lovelorn and otherwise torn, telling them to stop cribbing and start living -- all in her her branded pithy, witty style. LESS ... MORE
It's in the news but I'm confused
Last weekend, TOI put me in a quandary. Saturday's top edit was called 'The Importance Of Being Earnest'. It wasn't about Wilde's misplaced baby. It was about untamed consequences of international misunderstanding. Deploying examples from military history it conveyed real-time caution to the seven delegations of multi-party MPs who've fanned out to present the truth about Pak-sponsored terrorism. The edit warned that this important attempt to remove any misunderstanding about our position harbours a possibility of the message itself being mis-understood in any of the targeted 33 countries. Ignoring Hindi jihadis – and subtly promoting its own USP – TOI pitched English as the best medium for the message. I'll say 'Three, or rather 33, cheers!' to that. Provided the messengers themselves – 'experienced and articulate' though they are – have been fully briefed not only on What, but more so on How. Why? Because, like truth and Tharoor, English is seldom plain and almost never simple.
Then STOI rah-rah-ed Banu Mushtaq's International Booker win. No problem with that. It's the equal applause for the translation that's causing my confusion. Illa, illa, I'm not thoo-thoo-ing Deepa Bhasthi's raw, hybrid English moulded to the contours of colloquial Kannada. I'm all for empire currying the King's angrezi. But then what happens to the previous para's stance? Imagine the Babel if our diplomats start adding their own idiomatic tadka? More to my point, do aforesaid 'global-outreach' MPs have linguistic handlers? Parroting script no can do. Complex questions will demand nuanswers. One misstep could make the whole exercise stumble.
Earlier remarks on Col Sofiya further complicate this 'propah-improppur English' business. The MP mantri tried shrugging off a bigoted and sexist slur as a mere 'linguistic mistake'. The SIT will hopefully rubbish this MCP's men-dacity as SC did his non-apology. My question concerns Dr Ali Khan. Call me elitist, but how 'linguistically' equipped are those cops tasked with fine-toothcombing all his past posts written in professorial English? With 'anti-national' the semantic chameleon of our time, I hope no dis-understanding there.
***
Alec Smart said: 'Mumbai' metro stations submerged. Undergrounded. '
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