Question: Why does India’s, and perhaps the world’s, premier umpire, S. Venkatraghavan, chew gum like an adolescent? Sometimes the gob on one side becomes so prominent that he looks as if he has put a whole packet of that mindless narcotic in his mouth. He also seems to chew either angrily or hungrily, implying that he is either being eaten by a secret sorrow, or there were not enough vegetables available for breakfast. Both theories have their merits. To look at Venkat is to look at the face of a Secret Sorrow. What that secret may be I cannot tell. Perhaps Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi or Ajit Wadekar did not give him enough overs to bowl. Maybe he is bitter with his parents for bringing him into the world at the same time as E.A.S. Prasanna and B.S. Chandrashekhar, with Bishen Singh Bedi waiting in the wings to trip him. On the other hand, hunger works equally well as a reason. Where in South Africa is he going to find “idlis” for breakfast?
Venkat is a thinking man. Surely he realizes that his USP (Unique Selling Proposition, for those who don’t know management jargon) is dignified integrity? Being human, he is fallible; but no one, official or spectator, questions his motives. Chewing gum erodes credibility. Whoever created this miserably useless bit of rubber obviously took inspiration from the cow. Chewing cud is not the most inspirational thing you can do while judging the fate of nations in front of millions of television viewers. It implies that you are tense, and need to chew stupidly to calm your nerves. Venky will represent not only himself, but also India at the World Cup in a few weeks. It is possible that he will be the only Indian visible on the television screen in the second half of the Cup, after the Great Indian Team has returned after being defeated by Zimbabwe. He cannot let the side, and the country, down. He can have all the “paan” he wants when back home.
Question: Why does Saurav Ganguly blame the pitch when he gets exposed in New Zealand as a batsman with two left feet and no brains? A pitch is not made for just one side. Both teams have to play on it. It isn’t as if India is told to take one bouncy irreverent strip while New Zealand is offered a dead track nearby. A home team will always try and squeeze advantage from a local pitch. That is what Saurav Ganguly does in Eden Gardens. Moreover, there is a neutral toss to determine who gets first use of pitch, to either bat or bowl. If the pitch is such a vicious swinger, then why bat first after winning the toss? And which pitch in the world can be blamed for India being bowled out, consistently, within less than 50 overs? The pitch is the same for Saurav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid; how come Rahul can bat and Ganguly cannot? Has some special instruction been given to Indian bowlers forbidding them to exploit the bounce of the pitch? If these matches are meant to prepare the team for South Africa, why should the captain of India expect either featherbeds or turners? Pace and swing are going to get wickets in South Africa; line and length are going to prevent runs. Where better to test this out than in New Zealand? Or are we planning to win the World Cup without getting any wickets? Sachin Tendulkar would need to score a hundred and Rahul his traditional 76 in every match in that case. The simple fact of the matter is this: What happened to the Indian cricket team in New Zealand is exactly the same as that which happened to the Congress in Gujarat. Neither the Indian cricket team nor the Congress Party has ever been in such disarray. And both are refusing to change the captain for the real game ahead — the World Cup in South Africa and the general elections in India.
Question: Why have television news anchors begun to punctuate their chirpy disbursement of news with a sucking sound that goes something like this: Pchha? My personal memory bank indicates that someone in BBC started this trend. It is an irritating, pseudo-superior sound that is possibly also considered sexy in the suburbs of Camden or the restaurants of Notting Hill. A careful hint of a smile partners the spitting sound. Maybe it is the small pout with which pchha! is thrown at the viewer that is meant to be the turn-on. Cultural colonialism being what it is, a number of Indians have begun to do their own versions of pchha! It doesn’t sound quite the same in the local dialects, if you see what I mean, but who can stop an anchor once he or she believes that breaking a sentence with a pseudo-sexy intonation is the key to the next promotion? The habit has not become an epidemic because some restraint has clearly been placed by the Americans, for which we should be grateful. I recall some CNN anchor who used to do this, but I cannot see the lady on the screen now. Thank you, CNN.
Question: How has everyone — with the notable exception of Praveen Togadia and Ashok Singhal — turned secular after the Gujarat elections? Narendra Modi now holds press conferences to announce that he has forgiven a Muslim who sent him hate mail. He wears a beatific smile, the kind of smile that you do with half-closed eyes brimming with goodwill toward the fellowman. A tape recorder placed close to Modi’s chest could have preserved the sound of the milk of human kindness sloshing about in his heart. There was no mention of Mian Musharraf in the whole press conference.
The deep pangs of secularism have hit everywhere. Prime Minister Vajpayee doesn’t muse every year. Last year, for instance, he stuck strictly to amusement during his year-end holiday; there was no musing. This year he mused, thanks to Gujarat. Maybe he should have mused a little more during the Gujarat elections, when the air was thick with a different rhetoric. To be fair to Vajpayee, he spoke the language of amity and togetherness even during the election campaign in Gujarat; but equally, he did nothing to prevent anyone in his party from saying what they wanted to say. Alas, the politician triumphed over the humanist. The stakes were too high. Those who had won the bets in Gujarat were first bemused at the prime minister’s Goa musings. Then they lost their temper. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which loves repeating itself, denounced Vajpayee as a pseudo-Hindu.
Sonia Gandhi, who spent the whole of the Gujarat campaign being a pseudo-Hindu, decided that it was high time she became pseudo-secular again. The Congress Party, which had been pseudo-obedient during the Gujarat fiasco, loyally rediscovered secularism. Its first reaction to the rout in Gujarat had been to blame, in this order, the pitch, the umpire, and the opposing captain. When carping found no takers, it retreated into silence. Even Ambika Soni stopped praising Sonia Gandhi’s leadership on television, which is saying something. After a few days, someone dusted an old file and produced a speech for the leader in which she denounced the BJP as communal and claimed that Congress was the true flagbearer of secularism. Such faith could last even as long as the next election
Question: Here is one I think I do have an answer to. Why do so many applicants for jobs, when wanting to describe their marital status, call it instead their martial status? Is dyslexia a natural trait of Indian English? Or is this some deep sign of Indian wisdom that hints at the truth by the elliptical process of insinuation? Marriage is so often a martial art.
The better explanation is that English is at last becoming a democratic language. All foreigners who came to India to settle, or rule, or both, brought a language with them. India quickly Indianized it. Persian morphed into Urdu. English remained a ruling class language because the English, with a few exceptions, did not mix with the natives. The sahibs stuck to themselves, finished their tour of duty, and went home. The Mogals, or the Pathans, or the Turks, or the Kushans — and we could go all the way back to the Aryans — did not have home leave. India became their home.
Paradoxically, but logically (does that make it a double paradox?) English became an Indian language much after the British left India. Till the 1960s there was open conflict between English and Hindi for the status of link language, or the national language if you like. Parties as different as the Socialists, Communists and Jana Sanghis, believed that the poor could not become involved in nation-building unless the nation chose to rule itself in their diction. In the 1970s the conflict began to melt, not because anyone in power changed the dynamics of the language-people relationship but because the people found their own answers. The usage of Hindi crossed the Vindhyas, and the usage of English crossed class barriers. As English seeped down, its grammar took a hammering. Which is preferable? Growth or grammar? English is safe in India because of bad English.
Arab News Opinion 5 January 2003
