Sunday, October 28, 2012

Twisted by tongue

I'm weeping while I'm typing this piece. No, I'm not the sentimental kind for sure. Just that my amma feels it's a cool trait to cut onions sitting nearer to my PC. Funnily enough, she isn't shedding a single teardrop. Perhaps mothers have struck a secret deal with the most consumed vegetable on this multi-tongued planet!
Speaking of tongues, what language are your dreams made up of? It could be very different from the one you think in. Better still, it could be anything from your mother tongue to English. Yeah, I do realise that English has become the debut language of a considerable amount of Indian populace. But we can't overrule the reality that English is and will always be a foreign language. They won't ever accept us the way we embraced their so-called language of angels. Having said that, it wasn't forced on us so the colonial baggage is just a historical conjecture. On the contrary, English makes us feel better about ourselves but then, so does ignorance. Progress has a price to pay. However, what gets my goat is the fact that there are some of us who are in perpetual denial of where they come from. They simply detach themselves from every shred of ethnicity as if it's an incurable disease. They feel that it's a natural side-effect of being cosmopolitan. Anyway like they say, to each his own. But if that is so, it's high time we owned what is truly ours. After all, a language doesn't take as much time to perish as it takes to birth and evolve. Especially in a dream city shrouded in absolute fakeness.
Still weeping because my Tulu isn't good enough for amma to acknowledge the kind of pain my untrained eyes are battling as of now. Or maybe she just wants me to stop being such a smartass—who loves preaching others on how things are—and log out of the virtual world to go take a bath on a Sunday.

3 comments:

shimmeringmoonlight said...

Even at the risk of putting my foot into my mouth,i'"ll say that you read your mother's mind pretty well.....like a good son! :-)

Pratibha said...

Liked the way you said about losing your roots as and when you give up on your mother tongue. Every else is alien , no matter how much efficient it is.

And now I must remind mother again to teach me to read punjabi !

Anonymous said...

we dream in the language depending on the context. Suppose in dream we are around parents then we dream in the language that we use with them.. when we are with friends we dream in that language..
most of the time dreams dont really have any language they are more visual..

if you put a piece of onion above your ear, there wont be no tears