Indian newspapers – reach for those chopsticks
If you’re like me, you’ve probably reached the end of the internets more than once. That’s the feeling you get when you have exhausted every blog, newspaper and crappy sites with “popular” stuff guaranteed to kill a few gray cells. That’s when I turn to online websites of Indian newspapers.
That’s also when I reach into my desk drawer for a pair of spare chopsticks to put my eyes out and the nearest heavy object to bash my head in. The ten ads flashing in my face pitching everything from a tin-can on wheels to the promise of the perfect bride, I can take. That’s just crappy site design — desis expect that. What gets me every time is the meaningless jumble of arcane and bombastic English words, that instantly curdles my brain. Spend half a day reading through these newspapers and you will learn nothing of the current state of affairs in India.
After reading a few articles, you’re left wondering if India got a raw deal. We were told growing up that in return for approximately US fifty trillion (today’s value, adjusted for inflation), the British were going to teach us English, train our bureaucrats, build us a railroad system and civilize the natives (the railroad, etc., are ripe with topics for future rants.)
Or could it be that the level of English proficiency is fine; its just that newspapers hire journalists who can churn out strings of bombastic gibberish. In my parent’s pursuit of top-notch education (doctor or engineer) I must have missed the ads for journalism school. “Join us,” they might have said, “and we’ll make you a top notch journalist in just three years. Year one: lose those shackles of grammar and norm. Year two: fill your brain with words that no one knows because they went out of style in 1854. Year three: learn to use language more elaborate than is justified by or appropriate to the content being expressed. Graduate and unleash your skills on an deserving population.”
I’d love to be a fly on the wall at a prospective journalist’s interview during campus recruitment. “O respected and honored Sir,” a candidate says, “I am nothing but the dust beneath most wonderful durable leather covering that adorns beautiful extremity of thy leg most often in contact with the ground when walking. If there be God in the heaven and the God shows me the mercy, it will be the greatest privilege and the highest honor to serve as even the minion in your most esteemed and renounced institution of print and publication,” proudly bringing to bear his newly acquired skills mixed with a unique regional twist to English that encourages its speakers to drop articles where needed and use them where they are most inappropriate. I can almost see the ears of the interviews perking up as they soak in the meaningless gibberish and in back room conversations as they compare notes, one of them probably says: “That boy, yes, yes, that one. He is the one only. Such a wonderful way with words, no?”
Chopsticks please…
