Chutnefying english

Spent the last weekend attending an interesting seminar organized by MICA , on the birth of Hinglish and death of English - aptly called 'Chutnefying English' .

Purists and practitioners were at loggerheads trying to take sides while trying to sound very meaningful . Mahesh Bhatt very uncharacteristically read out two full pages of a thesis on how statistically now more people speak hinglish than english ( pulling a 350 mn number out of his hat ) and how earlier in films it was only villians and comedians who spoke hinglish but now it has degenerated hindi itself . Mehmoods' lines 'Bahaar ki chokri kitna advance hai' or the song 'mera joota hai japani , patloon inglistani' were the earliest hinglish renditions and most villians were 'Peter ' , 'Mona' or 'Michael' - taking off on colonial times . Its only when Bhatt took off in extempore citing his rich experiences as a filmmaker that the debate gained heat . He wondered why we learnt 'Jack and Jill ' or 'Little Miss Muffet' when there was a huge repository of urdu and hindi literature and why kids don't like parents who still don't know english . His point being 'mother tongue ' helped one connect to ones own self - something he repeated ad nauseam.

Rupert Snell , the Hindi and Braj teacher from the University of Texas , Austin was terrific . He hilariously introduced Bhatt , kept the sunday audience in splits with his chaste hindi and tackled with dry humor all the muck people slung at 'oh those brits'. Shannon Finch , the gritty anthropology student ( while protesting vehemently on why Gurcharan Das didn't give her the time he committed ) gave an interesting insight on why people repeat sentences in hindi and english for effect - a phenomenon she called Bilingual Repitition with some very good examples - recorded from students she gave recorders to capture their usage -

A teacher instructing a class followed the ask 'Kitab khol deejiye' with 'Please open your books' . In a random conversation , ' Aadha saal khatam ho gaya' was followed by 'Half the year is gone' by a student . And how what she called code switching - mixing multilingual words - added to empathic stress . To illustrate she played out a recording from her research : Suddenly , we were talking about India aur achanak usne subject change kar diya .( 'Suddenly' and 'achanak' being similar words with the hindi version adding to dramatic effect )

Also , as an example of code switching used to define which language the sentence came from she used an example ( sentences below ) - it seems that while the first sentence below has more english words than hindi , its still a hindi sentence while the second with fewer english words is an english sentence .

Daddy ki blue shirt table par hai

Film rajaas ki duniya is not worth ek single rupaiah

Someone also amplified boringly the science of mixing hindi verbs and english nouns and adjectives - gherao-ed , manao-ed , maska-fying etc. The other aspect of this debate was the commerce behind it all . The need to connect , felt Prasoon Joshi was far more important that the need to maintain purity . e.g Pepsi's Yeh Dil Maange More reflected youthfulness , aggression as in 'maange' , a movement away from the scarcity era with 'more' and Coke rebounded with 'Life Ho To Aisi ' another hinglish line . A movie like 'Jab we met ' also went on to rake in huge moolah due to its refreshing take on youthful romance . Another young bloke studied spanish usage in the US to conclude that there is nothing like Spanlish as purists rule that lingo - so much so that even TV broadcasters prefer pure spanish speakers without a word of english embedded in it .

Here's my take on the Hinglish affair - language is a means of communication . So it is sub-servient to a need - the need to communicate . It can't be a master - you need to learn it and speak in its pure form . Shakespeare added 30000 words to the english then , now new age technology has added many more words to it - did we have words like googled , flickrd , wifi , podcast , itune , wikipedia , second life , smsed ,email - so who is to say that Hindi can't add words of its own . If it helps millions reach out to others - a little twist , some nichod will maybe help english survive .

Code-mixing and bilingual repitition ki aisi ki taisi ,

Chill maro , mat karo bheja fry , piyo thoda cold lassi .

Kya english aur kya hindi , thoda punjabi mein jod do sindhi ,

Bani jo bhasha tod-marod , oose complete karo dictionary oxford !