The Language of Love

Bharat is a country with umpteen languages and even more dialects. I have experienced in Tamil Nadu, my home state, where the language Tamil is spoken differently in Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Kanyakumari. So, too, I found Haryanvi spoken differently in the state's southern districts of Rewari and Mohindergarh, a little more chaste in Jind and Jhajjhar, and with a mix of Punjabi in Yamunanagar and Ambala. This is true with almost every state, big and small, and its major language: Karnataka and Kannada, Odisha and Odiya, Uttar Pradesh and Hindi, Maharashtra and Marathi, and so on.It gets even more distinct and diverse when one starts counting the various tribal languages which don't have a script but contain so many songs and stories that carry the history of a region and its people. What is fascinating is how these distinct languages still have similar words and sentence construct that direct us to the roots of our civilisation.So, it has baffled me many times when language has been used as a tool to divide people rather than unite. It is true that several states in India are now in their current form only by carving them out based on linguistic identities. But this has to be seen merely from the purpose of administration and nothing more..Did you know when Haryana and Punjab were fighting over their borders, in a bid to spite the Punjab government, the Haryana government declared Tamil as their second official language, after Haryanvi?! There were hardly any Tamil speakers in Haryana then, but the Punjabis in Haryana couldn't get the government's ear. Only recently was the decision reversed and Punjabi made the second official language.Similarly, I've seen cab drivers and auto drivers in Chennai refusing to entertain customers who aren't conversant in Tamil or English. To keep the fight equally intense, most of my North Indian friends refuse to even attempt to learn Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam or Telugu when they move South for their education or job. But the same people are willing to pick up German or Swedish to survive abroad. And the very drivers who shooed potential customers away were seen grooving to Hindi film songs. The hypocrisy baffles me!But what we Indians have failed to understand is that it just takes a little effort to pick up a few words of a new language and the whole community engulfs you in a warm embrace. Just picking up the regular, 'how are you?', 'have you eaten?', 'yes', 'no', 'good' and the day's greetings in any language is enough to connect with the locals..As much as one's pride in their mother tongue is necessary to appreciate one’s culture, picking up other Indic languages opens a portal of opportunities and a greater understanding of this grand old civilisation.Why all this now? Well, I recently noticed that I was seated in a meeting of ten people at office, and all of us were native speakers of ten different languages. After a month of hanging out with one another, we spoke a smattering of other languages, keeping Hindi and English as the lingua franca. Suffice to say, we each felt understood and welcome when a team mate just asked for water or suggested we have lunch together in our mother tongue. If this language of love could win over the politics of language in just a group of ten, I wonder how much it can do good for a nation.