I have always felt that there is a wall, a barrier perhaps, between me and the outside world, and that barrier appears to be impenetrable at times. Many a times I have wished to tear down this wall, but each time, I have failed. I cannot deny the fact that in many ways I am afraid of the scathing real world; it is so different from my own glass house of comfort and warmth and however much I try to be a citizen of this other world I know I would be unsuccessful. The dichotomy between the real and the unreal became evident during my last India trip. I was surprised to see the new India (after three long years)—polished, brand conscious, bragging, rich and hostile and the old India—poor, emaciated, crying and broken. One who has an eye can catch these images very easily and store them or delete them from his mind. I chose to delete them temporarily and I cannot deny that I was kind of relieved to see no signs of poverty or desperation after I had disembarked in Nashville. In my one and half month tour of India I have often felt inhuman because there was nothing I could do to erase the terrible signs of pain and desperation. I tried to be philanthropic but when I thought that my one philanthropic act wouldn’t change the whole scenario, I felt helpless. What struck me most is that the canaille who are perpetually trying to act, live and pretend like the super-rich upper middle class and middle class people are successfully drowning into the false glory of excessive superficiality. In fact the whole country at one point seemed a superficial globe of unthinking people who only care about themselves. I know I sound harsh, but this is what I have felt. On many occasions I have seen signs of poverty raging in the city pavements, street children, crying beggars, specter thin child labors trying hard to survive for one more day while the unthinking, roll eating, food wasting crowd walking past them without even casting one glance. I cannot deny that modern India with its sky-scraping malls is a model of advancement, but I have to say that advancement hasn’t reached the nooks and corners of the country. Underneath the facade of avant garde gadgets and posh shopping malls, people still gloat in the darkness of caste system and racial discrimination. Women still now are the second class citizens of the patriarchal land, and however much a woman tries to explore her innate super abilities, she cannot be equal to the male members of her household. A group of women are even proud being subservient to the will of the male members. People often say that I am cynical, but I feel if one only sees good the evils of the world would go unnoticed and if that happens, there will be no opportunity for the evil to change its color. I think the quality of people in India has declined terribly. In the streets I found people yearning to find an opportunity to fight with each other and insult each other. Like the city traffic that does not care about the walkers, the city people too have learned to care less about their neighbors. I was wrong in expecting courteous behavior outside the aegis of my family. Overall, my India trip was an eclectic experience where in one hand I spent lovely time with friends and family and on the other hand it was a blow to my sensitive soul seeing the ugly part of India that no body cares about. India needs to grow up in spirit; mall culture and brand consciousness will do no good to the country until the citizens learn to respect and care about each other. Respecting women is an important thing and judging them by their attire is wrong. Growth and development come first into one's mind and as a country India needs to broaden the horizon of her mind and create generous and loving people in future. I wish that the next time I visit India the ugly scars of poverty, pain and disrespect would be eradicated from the face of my country.
Net Lingo - How Cool Is That?
I am wondering when the avant garde technological companies will be coming up with a "Cool-Meter"--a device like a thermometer to measure how cool you are. Wouldn’t that be cool especially during this time of the 'Web-Age' when the internet has just finished blowing out its forty birthday candles? I think that would be cool, rather super cool! Don't mind the pun folks, its totally unintended!! And by cool please don’t think that I am talking about a sudden drop of your normal body temperature (that could be fatal, by the way), I am talking about the coolness of your 'Attitude'--your unruffled comport, your dress, your language and expressions as influenced by the Zeitgeist. Well not many of us can survive in this evil world of the web without being cool, and what is the easiest thing to look or feel or show how cool one is--a change of one's language. Do a complete metamorphosis of the alphabets and syllables and vowels and grammar (whatever you have learned in school, but you rather not tell your teacher about that, I bet he/she wouldn’t be very happy with the space-age transformation of a language) and voila, you get a cool outfit to dress your mouth (your language silly, I am not talking about lipstick).
Let me give you a couple of examples and elucidate my point: "HW ru?" "howz lyf" or even shorter "tc" "thanx" "vre impressiv" and the list goes on and on and on. Mind you there isn’t any difference between 'caps lock on' or 'caps lock off' in cool net lingo. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I heard a complete sentence from a series of people I interact with in the virtual world, most of them talk in such great and cool net lingo that an "uncool" person like me cannot just catch up with them. I think people are getting so busy these days that they seem to have no time to type a full sentence, even though typing "how are you?" takes only a fraction of a second more than typing "hw r u" (the question mark isn’t always there). It is the text messaging revolution and the instant messaging culture that begot this 'nuevo net lingo'. And soon after its birth, "be right back" became "BRB", "laugh out loud" became "LOL" and so on. I do understand the usage of such abbreviated forms of expressions in a text message or while chatting because there one has a shortage of space to write on, but I don’t know why people use such lingo everywhere (from emails to Facebook)? Pardon my troglodytic idea about cool lingo, but I simply don’t get it. I some how feel that a language is sacrosanct and therefore inviolable, and when I see people around me are conversing in this language at social networking websites, blogging sites and even in emails, I cannot help but feel agitated. I guess this is high time I get used to this revolutionary new English or whatever it is else I might end up as a loner in this world.
Net Lingo surely and undeniably has a great influence on the world, wait till the day the Times of India reads something like this:
TOI: NWS, SPRTS, ENTRNMNT, LFE&STYL, HT ON THE WB, OP, BLGS, CLASS
Hdlns: Jt Arwys flghts canclld coz plots go o9 mss casl leav
I tell you that day is not far when every thing in this world starting from your résumé to your formal letter to the boss would be written in cool net lingo. I wonder how my resume would look, probably like this:
"FN: BSB
POB: Kol, WB
DOB:…"
The process would undoubtedly be great since we are all engaged in the marathon rat-race of career to such an extent that our lives are devoid of leisure or entertainment or feeling good about our work, during these tough times who wants to worry about a malleable language? But I think the spirits of Shakespeare or Keats would never compose even their random thoughts in this net lingo. May be people are losing originality these days or may be it is the "chalta hai" culture that is responsible for the transformation of language (English in this case) or may be people like us who love the English language and try to learn it to the best of our ability should better give up their high hopes of listening to or learning an unstained, pure English and try becoming cool like others.
