Gobbledygook at Work

“BUT . . .” I said flabbergasted, “what explains his charisma if people can’t understand him?”

“But don’t you see,” said Mrs Kumar, surprised at my naivety, “that’s just what his charisma’s all about . . . He spews old classical Tamil . . . scholars in Madurai might get some of it; people in Chennai can’t follow a word . . .”

“Good god!” I said. “He leads the masses, and not one in the herd can figure out what he utters . . . Tamil’s your mother tongue . . . can’t you follow what he says?.”

“No . . . well, a word here and there . . . but not enough to understand his speeches . . . but isn’t it the same in Bengal? Do the people there understand what Jyoti Basu says . . . or the others of what do you call it---Left Front?”

“Isn’t it the same with all our netas?”—Mr Kumar chipped in.

North-east monsoon showers had cooled Chennai, though the fan in Mr Kumar’s Thiruvanmiyur flat whirred rather too gently, I thought.

“You can view the beach from our balcony, you know . . .”

But I wasn’t interested in the surf. “Well, yes, Mr Jyoti Basu was never an orator . . . never completed a sentence . . .”

“Ah, there you are . . . and they voted Jyoti Babu to power every time, didn’t they? That proves the point doesn’t it? ---our netas always use language so it all adds up to nothing . . . at least nothing the common man can make head or tail of . . .”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said. “Take Laloo Prasad . . . there’s a neta who breaks out into dehati ever so often, you know . . . right down to earth . . .”

“That’s only a stunt.” The diminutive Mr Kumar was a Kannadiga; had married a stout Tamil: both knew Hindi well; he’d worked mostly in Lucknow for a pharmaceutical firm. “Laloo’s a clever manipulator . . . he always played the buffoon . . . got the crowd giggling . . . here was their neta mouthing their very dialect, see? . . . they lapped it up . . . just swept dissent aside . . . so it boils down to the same thing, don’t you see? . . . The idea is to fool the people . . . our man here does it with high-flown Tamil . . . Laloo there used low-brow stuff . . .”

The plain-language campaigner in me felt uneasy. If Indians worship obscure language, I thought, what chance I’d ever succeed with my campaign?

The presentation I’d made for bigwigs of Kolkata Municipal Corporation came to mind. I’d strained four hours with a Powerpoint presentation, asking them if the language of their ads and public notices was at all what the ordinary person ever used. Their ads use strange Sanskritised coinages. Any of us ever heard the monstrosity atikraman? That’s the word KMC people chose to tell shopkeepers they must not encroach on pavements to display or dump their wares.
But a woman officer defended it: it was in their “official dictionary”. “But why do you use such a dictionary? Why don’t you go outside and hear what the ordinary man uses for ‘encroachment’?

Wouldn’t plain dakhal do?” I got a hostile stare.

Worse was to come. I showed them a 200-word paragraph from the Right to Information Act, worded in atrocious gobbledygook. “If the Right to information Act is worded in such obscure language, doesn’t it amount to denial of information?” I asked.

I then enthusiastically showed them my rendering of that chunk into 60 words of plain language, broken down into two sentences.

Nobody showed the slightest interest. I overheard two KMC officers admiring the 200-word slab. “All 200 words in a single sentence . . . a genius---wow!”

Mr Kumar went on to other things, but new light was dawning on me even as the evening darkened outside. Language, I’d always believed, had to convey sense. But here was irrefutable evidence we Indians worship babble!

Isn’t this why mountebanks and ‘godmen’ always succeed in our country? Suppose a political party were to field a vocal schizophrenic. Would his babble take the gang to victory at the hustings?

I shuddered, and didn’t want to face the probable answer.

The author’s website: http://www.clearenglish.in/