Touchstones: Where’s goodness, integrity

A recurrent nightmare I have is that I am drowning and can’t breathe. I open my eyes with a start and discover it was the result of having covered my nose with a quilt or coverlet, and breathe easy once again. I try to imagine the horror of those who were literally buried alive as a devastating landslide in Wayanad slithered down at 1 am, when most people were sleeping soundly. Even worse must have been the end of those who did not die immediately but were buried under a mound of rubble and could not escape. There can be no worse death, so let us keep the politics out of it and just pray that we all learn lessons from this tragedy that was both man-made and a natural disaster, triggered by unprecedented rain.

For years, renowned ecologists have been warning governments against rampant illegal mining, blasting fragile mountains to build roads, changing forestland into human habitations, but who listens? Each party has had a role to play and blaming one or the other is not going to bring back those poor villagers and innocent lives that now lie buried. The same story took place in our national capital: the death of three students in an illegally-run basement library raises many questions, but the person who finds himself in jail is the driver of an SUV that was passing by. Really? Several coaching centres running out of residential properties, by violating every known rule in the book, now have nowhere to hide as public anger mounts and students have taken to the streets. Meanwhile, an obnoxious civil servant who lied her way into the IAS clears the exam by gaming the system. Thankfully, she has been dismissed but the question remains: how many others have used foul means to slither in by paying money to willing helpers and by misusing the caste reservation clauses?

Every morning, the national papers are fronted by full-page colour ads of these teaching centres that proudly display a list of successful candidates. Along with their mug-shots, there is a list of prominent retired bureaucrats who are advisers or are invited to share their ‘knowledge’ with hopeful learners. How much they are paid is anyone’s guess, but in every likelihood, they are there just as window-dressing to lure innocent students. The huge financial success of the Kota industry that started this trend now has copycat ‘institutes’ in every town. All this is well known but has anything been done thus far to regulate these ‘teaching shops’? You all know the answer to this no-brainer. Issues of paper leaks of the NEET exam as well as the dodgy reputation of this system are raised in Parliament and there are long editorial articles, but the next disaster brushes all this muck under the carpet, while the owners and promoters of this system go laughing to the bank.

In the last 30-odd years, we have succeeded in poisoning every institution and selection process to the extent that nobody respects either the academic world, or the sarkari babus. It is unfair to paint everyone with the same brush but the fact is that the dedicated and honest Indian is harder and harder to find. Public trust has been eroded so deeply that it will take generations for us to believe that goodness and integrity are not completely lost.

Let us turn now to a more entertaining topic. And this is the chutneyfication of language. I belong to the generation that still reads many newspapers and enjoys the new language, popularly known as Hinglish, slowly gaining acceptance. Our Hindi newspapers particularly are encouraged to use English words freely while reporting events and news. Now, if only we had followed this trend properly (as was done in Urdu, for example), we would not have our tongues twisted into Sanskritised translations that were promoted when Hindi became the preferred language. AIR and Doordarshan should have taken lessons from the Bombay film industry and those splendid lyricists and script writers who subtly introduced words that made it easier to convey emotions and concepts that gave us an emotional lingua franca. If Hindi is understood at all south of the Vindhyas, a large part of the credit must be given to these brilliant poets and filmmakers who reached out to the Indian inside each one of us.

Then came the Shobhaa De era and her natter that made English a chatpata masala of gossip about our stars and films. Today, I’m delighted when my sabziwala and cook use English words to describe what is best described by using English. However, remember that Hinglish has just the first two words to describe this ‘sangam’ of Hindi and English. Words borrowed from English far outnumber those that are taken from other Indian languages. Even Salman Rushdie, who introduced a new ‘Bumbaiya’ vocabulary into English, now writes in pristine English. There is food for thought there.

Yet, as I end this column, let me ask all of you who still read books, to go and buy a copy of ‘Knife’, his gut-wrenching account of the murderous attack that left him almost dead. This is a new Rushdie, a man who has confronted death first-hand and whose clever wordplay is a thing of the past. As a rumination on life, death and encounters that make one confront oneself honestly, it is unsurpassed. Wah, Salman, wah, is all I can say. Tussi great ho.