Language seems to be the new 'hot' word here now , and has knocked off reservation , corruption et all from the headlines ! But unfortunately its in the news for wrong reasons .
Come to think of it language is actually a means for communication which basically enables people to 'talk' and 'understand' and interact better with each other leading to improvemnet in the way we live.
But instead of enhancing realtionships and bring people closer , language , now seems to be a barrier which drawing people apart.
For ages , there was this debate about English vs Regional languages , the debate was fuelled by politicans who insisted that English langauge would contaminate and destory local languages and what not. They were instumental in bringing in various legislations to ensure that kids in Govt school are taught in mother tongue rather than English. But it is entirely different matter that children of these leaders attended private English medium schools ! Over the time the movement slowly eroded as people started realising that English is the passport to good future and you had to learn it ,whether u like it or hate it.
Evenstates like Bengal have gone soft on anti-English movement.
But suddenly now in South , the same movement has reared its ugly head again ! First it was PMK in TN with its oppostion to english names in tamil movies ! recently after coming to power the govt announced waiver of tax for films with tamil names ! I dunno by simply naming the films in tamil will these gaurdians of culture save the culture esp with kind of films being made these days !
In Karnataka there was huge outcry against Govt's ill advised move to close down schools which were teaching English , this was at a place known as It capital of the country and the global outsourcing hub which has a huge BPO industry where knowledge of English has opened a whole new successful world to millions of young graduates , ironically the word Bangalored will soon apply Bangalore itself if such people had their way and access to English education is cut off.
When states were formed , it was done on basis on language , the idea was to bring people of same language 'together' and all such states together to form a country called India.
But language instead of uniting people have turned into a force for dividing people , in Maharashtra it started with cries of of mumbai for marathis and through out south , you can notice that people who dont speak the local language always get the rough end of the stick.
When world over countries are encouraging ppl to learn English and get more in the IT/BPO pie here we are still fighting over wether we need to learn English or not !
When these ppl learn that we need to stop fighting over the share in the pie and rather look at increasing the size of the pie
Well the reason for me raving and ranting about this particular issue is that today happens to be a Karnataka Bandh , being from Kerala , the word Bandh is quite commonplace thing , so I took adequate precaution to ensure that I dont starve and would be able to spend the 'holiday' peacefully , but what i didnt anticipate was cable tv operators joining the bandh and shutting down all other channels except Kannada Channels all over Bangalore.
Now what could be the logic behind this ? Im totally at loss ? When the same thing happened after death of Dr.Rajkumar , I could understand it was mourning period for state , so all entertainment channels were blocked. But why today , why block all entertainment channels in other languages ? Why let Kannada movies/music channel play ? If they wanted ppl to understand their cause ( it is some border dispute , again language related) then they should have blocked all entertainment channles, allowing only news channel ( which incidentally has become a major source of entertainment ! ) ...
this is something i never get , why partiality towards outsiders , only localites get to enjoy this day off , espeicially in a city which prides itself as a Cosmopolitan city . This is not the first time we saw other language channels/movies targetted , last time there was ban on non-kannada films and what was really sad was that a lot of people were supporting it .All in all the level of tolerance is sometimes scary !
PS: Heard that Shekar Kapur is planning to make a movie set in future India , which deals with wars happening over water which wud be scarce commodity then , the movie was supposed to be called 'Paani' . I guess he could actually make a movie on wars based on language which might happen if such incidents continue , guess the movie on language wars might be called 'Basha' ( but oops there is already a Rajnikant movie by that name ! )
