She frowned, shook her head disapprovingly and said, "This is bad. Madrasis speak only madrasi. Everyone must learn Hindi. It is the National Language no?". There are only few things that are as annoying as the sentence above. But then I checked myself. Why should I get upset just because she's an idiot?
So I explained to her about this whole new thing called Tamil and about how there's no such language called Madrasi. She nodded blankly - poor thing was denser than I thought!
She reiterated the need for every Indian to learn Hindi, citing her own example - about how she learnt Hindi in school along with Punjabi.
I told her, "Maybe we can follow Singapore's model in language education".
"Yea yea, Singapore is very good", she nodded her assent.
"Yes, even though Malay is the National Language, they learn English and their own mother tongue in school. Malay isn't a 'must learn' you know', I said.
'Oh', she said. She clearly didn't expect that. And changed the topic.
Speaking of Malay, its one of the interesting languages and also easy to understand a little if you know English. For one, it uses the English alphabets. And most of the words are derived from English, Tamil, Hindi etc. For example, consider the following - 'I went by tren to the nearby pasar. It was a long walk from the tren stesen so I took a teksi. On the road I saw many elektrik lights. I saw a farmasi shop and a telekommunikasi shop.'
No, I haven't misspelled. Its how they were spelt in Malay. Any trip to Malaysia is spiced up by trying to decipher the road signs and a finding a small joy when a word is understood. 'Must learn' or not, learning a new language is interesting, no?
4 comments:
ur blog reminds me of Chetan Bhagats recent book "2 states"... Everybody who are from south are madrasis and those from east, west, north are northis... ;-)
Interesting one!! completely agree wit u:)) Malay s quiet simple . And learning new languages, ahh.. same pinch.. I jus love thm. Sorry to talk abt malayalam again ., I enjoyed learning to read n understand mal during a trip to kerala:)
Although I can empathise with you, I still don't understand why Tamizhs have to be so touchy about 'learning hindi'. For the record Hindi is not our national language but it is one of the official languages of Indian State.
You don't have to be too condescending towards that old lady.She may be 'denser' coz probably she did not get the opportunity to go to school like you did.Afterall Tamilnadu was not bifurcated like Punjab.
This is my observation(having spent a considerable part of my life in Chennai) that all Madrasis(if I may call so) like everything which is there in USA or in South East Asian countries.No wonder you find so many 'Madrasis' in those countries.
If you can learn Malay why not Hindi?And definitely not for the reason that it is our 'National' language.Anyways the choice is yours.
@Nivi
Yeah what IS up with us and the generalisation?? Why does every one of us do it? ;-)
@Ramya
I know!! Mal is one of the sweetest-sounding languages isn't it? Wish I could speak it!!
@Shiwam
Here's another generalisation dude!! Well, I wasn't touchy about learning hindi - not forgetting those quotes :-) I just do not want to be forced to do so!!
And yes, you said it right, the choice is completely mine. I'd love to learn a language that fascinates me and Hindi does that equally well as Malay.
And for the record, we Madrasis like most of the stuff which is there in Northern parts of India as well :-)
Post a Comment