dear Rashmi

 I  am reading the first chapter of ‘Connect the Dots’  - Prem Ganapathy of Dosa Plaza… “Neenga yeludhuna content nalla than iruku anna puriyatha languagula yeludhi yen ippadi pandringa…”

Can you understand that sentence in Tamil?

Your book is also like that only… Can you pls give a book which written in Full English..?
 
Regards
M Suresh
Coimbatore

This is not the first email I have received on this subject, and it won’t be the last. So, let me explain main apni books mein beech beech mein Hindi kyun use karti hoon.

In the case of ‘Connect the Dots’, there is a slight technical reason. Several of the interviews were conducted fully in Hindi. Not that the subject did not know English but he was more at ease in the native tongue.

And that’s perfectly OK, I can translate the interviews. But some words and phrases lose their impact in translation… So I deliberately leave them as is.

But, the reason I use Hindi goes beyond that.

My style of writing is about making the written word flow, to reflect the way we speak in what we read. And none of us speaks the Queen’s English today; it’s all mashed up.

I started writing like this a long time before mashing up was accepted, at least by the media. My very first middle, published by a newspaper called The Indian Post in August of 1989, bore the title ‘Crazy about phoren’.

What word can you substitute for ‘phoren’ – ‘imported goods’? Not quite the same thing, is it?

Well, Indian Post had a very young and progressive editor by the name of Nikhil Lakshman (he is now the editor of rediff.com). Four years later, when I worked with The Independent (owned by the TOI group), it was rather different!

As a young management trainee I actually got an opportunity to create a youth page called ‘INDY’. The truth is, no one in the editorial team wanted the headache but who could say ‘no’ to the owner, Vineet Jain. So they gladly let me do it… and I did it my way.

INDY was a page of, for and by the youth and it broke unwritten rules, quite happily. Every Friday I would show the completed, fully composed page to the editor – Ms Dina Vakil. I often detected a slight wrinkling of her delicate nose, at the kind of headlines I chose.
 
But ‘INDY’ became wildly popular and equally important – Vineet Jain loved it. So the Oxbridge brigade had to live with it.

The same tradition continued when I started JAM. We assumed that a majority of our readers understood the use of a Hindi word or phrase or even an entire paragraph. If the writer chose to put it that way.

And I never had a single complaint on this front.

When I started writing ‘Stay Hungry Stay Foolish’ I wrote it the only way I know how. As the words came to me. And yes, it included the odd phrase or even entire sentence in Hindi.

I did this because I was focussed on an audience of young Indians. And I believe 90% of this audience has functional knowledge of Hindi – and will get it.

To the remaining 10% my sincere apologies. I will say in my defence that most of the time… when I use Hindi.. it is not with respect to crucial information. And if I use an entire sentence I do try and follow that up with a sentence in English which means pretty much the same thing.

But yes, there are exceptions. The entire ‘advice’ page of the Prem Ganapathy chapter is in Hindi. The translated version, somehow, did not have the same earthiness, or impact.

However, I will definitely post it here for the benefit of readers like Suresh.

At the end of the day, I find almost every Indian newspaper has given up on propah English. But very few lament the loss of grammar and perfection in prose. Because we have accepted ki ‘we are like this only’.

I don’t think of it as ‘Hinglish’- just a reflection of our multi-lingual reality.

I am going to make a statement which may be controversial, but I truly think Hindi has emerged as a ‘national language’ over the last 15 years. Not because it was ‘imposed’ on people but because of pop culture. Especially Bollywood.

For that matter, most of us know a fair smattering of Punjabi now, thanks to ‘Hindi’ film songs.

The mash up continues; nothing is sacred anymore. Long live the desification of inglis. And the anglicisation of desis.

This entry was posted Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 8:04 pm and is filed under Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.