English revisited

The English language can produce hilarious results at times. This I experienced when I was teaching the subject in a junior college in the city. I loved to test my innocent students, who mostly hailed from mofussil towns around Bengaluru.

During composition class, I’d give them a list of idioms and ask them to use them in sentences of their own. My favourite idioms were cock-and-bull story, to nip in the bud, white elephant and so on. The assortment of answers I was rewarded with gave me new insights into the language.

One original mind came out with 'the cock told the bull a story'. Hilarious, but worthy of a fiction writer like Marquez, indeed. I had given the class an example of a sentence with 'to nip in the bud'. To which my young friend wrote, 'children should be nipped in the bud'. Once again worthy of the pessimist Jonathan Swift who had said that children should be eaten in small morsels at breakfast. Again — white elephant. 'There were no white elephants to be found in his father's estate', this boy wrote, 'but only grey pachyderms'.

When a north Indian mango dealer says mangoes ripen in the loo, there is no need to look shocked at his unhygienic mind. Probably, he is referring to the dust storms of May and June, during which season mangoes ripen. During the Raj days, master and subaltern exchanged such hilarities that brought a whole lot of new vocabulary into usage. But they understood each other perfectly.

At the end of my college term, I had to mark about a 100 test papers of the young hopefuls whose English-learning capacities remained minimal in spite of all my pedagogical efforts. However, the chief in charge of the tests gave us a few guidelines regarding the marking of papers. Don’t look for niceties and nuances of the language, he said. Grammar and spelling don’t matter as long as the sense is conveyed. Subject and object can be reversed.

For instance, a sentence like 'the cake saw me' is as good as 'I saw the cake', the chief said. Mark it correct. We followed his instruction and most of the students who would otherwise have failed got pass marks. Those were the days when English was being downplayed in a newfound fervour for regional and national loyalties.

In the present computer age, English has regained its numero one place. Now, even my housemaid’s child wants to go for English medium as the parents see him as a techie in the far distance. A reputed academic who was vociferous in his advocacy of the mother tongue as the medium of learning recently changed his tune to demand English-medium teaching to children upwards of five years of age in all schools, including government-aided ones. When questioned by the media about his change of language policy, his answer was that our Kannada-medium kids were losing out in the digital job market because of their backwardness in English.

So back to English. Thus we have hailed a new colonisation in the wake of globalisation.