It took me some time to figure out this one. The first time some months ago I noticed “Don’t Fast” written on the back of a truck, I wondered if the driver intended to convey this for Anna Hazare, who periodically goes on hunger strike. A little later though, a light bulb clicked in my brain and I realised that the writing was meant to advise or warn other vehicles not to speed or travel fast! Since the first occasion I spotted this exhortation, it has busted popularity charts.
A road sign popular all over the country declares: “We are like you but not like your speed”. I am still trying to configure who is like whom? I also wonder if this is a distorted Indian English way of saying, “We like you”, which has become “We are like you” (hum aap jaise hi hain) in translation. Could it be that the author meant “We are liking you”, that is, “Aap humein achchhe lagte hain”? Since there is no Hindi sign expressing the same thought, it is difficult to cross-check and come to a firm conclusion.
Road signs in India are highly evocative, even when written in correct English; some are replete with sexual innuendo, such as: “My curves are gorgeous. Go over them gently.” This could be spotted frequently while driving from Manali to Leh some years ago. Maybe in this age of political correctness, the sign has been replaced with a less suggestive one, but I give full marks for imagination to the man from the Border Roads Organisation who crafted it.
Anyway, this is not an article about road signs or writings on the back of trucks. But they often convey the spirit of India’s multi-hued culture and colloquialisms such as yesteryears’ favourite, “PK 100 jaa”, that is, drink and go off to sleep. With the authorities cracking down on drunken driving, this piece of advice is rarely spotted nowadays. Signs like these can be categorised as early attempts to familiarise rural road users with the English alphabet, a trend that has since been adopted wholesale by many Hindi newspapers.
By the time “Singh is King” went viral on trucks and SUVs (it was too macho to be used by owners of relatively petite cars like Maruti 800 or Santro!), English letterings had become the norm rather than the exception. But one sign that is still common, and my favourite for sheer blood-curdling vengeance, is “Buri nazar wale, tere bhi bachche jiye, aur bada ho ke tera hi khoon piye”. Just visualise this creative hatred: “You have cast an evil eye on me, but I pray your children too may grow up”. Then comes the clincher “…and drink your blood!”
With such continuous mix-up of emotions and the growing urge to express ideas in English, it is not surprising that journalists working for English language publications end up filing hilarious copy. Very often these escape the sub-editors whose main job is to correct the language. The best one that swam through their net was a report about a decade ago in a leading national daily. Describing a case of chain-snatching in which criminals shot dead the man who tried to resist and pursue the chain-snatchers, the reporter stated: “The deceased gave chase to the criminals who, however, managed to escape”! Howlers still abound in most daily newspapers, (The Pioneer is no exception), leave alone typographical errors, grammatical mistakes and syntax errors. Paradoxically, the quantum of mistakes has gone up significantly in recent years despite technological innovations such as the spell-check program on computer terminals at the Desk.
Earlier, the system of copy correction was much more rigorous, although tedious and time-consuming. Once a closely-typewritten report was edited by hand using symbols with which today’s sub-editors are entirely unfamiliar, and bromides taken out, they were sent to the proof-reading department. That section has died a natural death with the advent of the computer. An army of proof-readers that could not speak any conversational English would sit with a copy of the hand-edited report and meticulously read out each word, punctuation marks included, while another man pored over the bromide, marking out errors committed while type-setting the report in what was quaintly called the Case Room.
Sub-editors of yore, however, took innate pride in their knowledge of Queen’s English and heaped scorn upon those who occasionally faltered. I got the taste of this disdain when I committed an error writing a caption for a photograph in The Statesman. Put on night duty at the Desk for a fortnight when I joined the then venerable institution in Kolkata by my Editor, a stickler for grammar, I slipped up one night and captioned the photo …in the outskirts of the city”. Today, none would bother. But that wasn’t so in The Statesman of the 1980s. When the page proof came to the News Editor, he corrected the error (in case you haven’t got it, the expression is on the outskirts) and showed it to a few colleagues.
For the next 30 minutes there was much merriment among Desk hands. In my full hearing, they rued the management policy of hiring “Oxford doctorates” who could not write correct English. Ignoring my beetroot-red ears, they complimented themselves for not going even to English-medium schools, leave alone foreign universities, claiming degrees alone could not teach a person the nuances of the English language. Arguably, they amended their opinion of me in a few months, but that night’s jibe still rankles.
Another time (ironically in The Hindustan Times, known those days as India’s only Punjabi newspaper in the Roman script!), the then Editor who nursed a visceral hatred for me, circulated a long note to the Desk pulling them up for letting go a heading given by me stating “much water has flown down the Yamuna”. He delighted in pointing out that water can only flow, never fly. Some colleagues tried to justify this by saying it was an accepted Indianism, which got the Editor’s goat further. I wrote a contrite apology for this appalling error, but the public humiliation still hurts.
Nowadays, the finer aspects of the language have been buried indecently or, rather, massacred at the altar of the ubiquitous sms! Although I have given up attempting to tell colleagues that it is “ruling the roast” and not roost or “chip of (not off) the old block”, it still bothers me to see blatant errors being perpetrated on the pages of newspapers. However, the fact is that Indian English has found acceptance in our everyday response. We no longer squirm upon spotting a police notice hung on the walls of a popular eatery at Behror on the Delhi-Jaipur Highway that warns: “Take care of belongings. You may be theft”!
An ex-purist like me is disturbed by this gross linguistic abuse. But many youngsters argue back that language is only a tool of communication; as long as the thought is adequately conveyed, how does grammar matter? There’s a point here. With prepone finding its way into the Oxford dictionary, it may not be long before PG Wodehouse’s classic coinage “He was not disgruntled but did not look gruntled either” becomes accepted usage.
