Invasion of culture: Indian psychology and English language

       There is a large class of people in India, who tend to speak few words or sentences especially in English. We will try to identify those words and also try to find out the reason behind it.

       Let us look closely into the matter and consider a scenario where someone is speaking in Hindi in front of a formal type aggregation (of Hindi speaking people who also know English). He suddenly finds himself in a situation where he needs to utter some explicit words (related to carnal desire). In most of the cases that person will prefer to use English to express his feelings. Why is so?

       You can find so many examples like these. Also, there are also few words which aren’t in explicit words category and are frequently substituted for their Hindi counterparts. We will discuss them later in this series. We will also discuss about what can prevent this.

       So, coming to the above example, why people tend to use English version of those words? Why aren’t they comfortable in their Hindi versions? Is it true that in our society, we are not habitual of talking about these terms and we don’t feel comfortable in uttering them? So we either talk around them or use English to lessen our guilt, shame etc. I think that this is because of our society and culture where very rarely people talk about these things openly, which makes us little uncomfortable, when we need to talk about them. Also most of the common Hindi terms for these words are either slang or now have become part of ancient Hindi and only have places in text books and sophisticated literature. When the common man needs to express such feelings, he goes for English version and frees himself from guilt. Also, in contrast with this, we always find some words in English which are very frequently used in western society. We influenced by western culture, even feel light and casual while speaking these words in English. Also in the current scenario we have such a big rift in terms of education. This is promoting the feeling that English is the language of elite and if we try to use more and more words of English in our sentences we are being more and more sophisticated.

       So, this difference between societies is promoting the current hybrid Hinglish culture where we can pick up few words of English words or say that sentence in English when we are not comfortable of expressing our feeling in Hindi. This somehow also promotes the tendency to adopt English as primary language.   We are not realizing that modern ideas and culture could be best imbibed by integrating them into Indian culture, not by aping them.

      Since you are aware of this too, the topic is open for discussion. You are welcome to have your comments on it.

What is more important "caste" or "crime"?

Here is another headline which you must have seen somewhere in news, which I feel that if put as a head line, also implies something different. I am talking about the headlines which explicitly put the caste of the rape victims, especially if the victim belongs to some lower caste of India. When rape happens somewhere, how much chance is there, that it happened on them because of their caste, not because of their vulnerable position and the criminal mind of attacker put together. Atrocities towards the weak elements of society are not a new thing. You can see it at every point irrespective of caste. It is like Survival of the fittest. Only better administration can prevent this. This has its origin as far as the human evolution. It is just because of selfish human mind. It has nothing to do with the caste of the victim. An assaulter never asks the caste before assaulting the victim.

So if we put the caste to which the victim belongs as first two words of headline. This means that we are emphasizing the fact the “lower caste of female victim” was more important than the fact of “being raped”. Which is ironic, because in most of the cases newsmakers don’t know the caste of the assaulter because they are unidentified? And if they are identified, you don’t know the motive or driving force of the rape. I am not denying the fact that few times rape also happens in order to show power of a community/caste/army towards other. But, if we are talking about the daily rape cases of India, motives and driving forces are essentially different statistically.

When you say that, a minor girl/boy was raped, you are emphasizing the severity of crime by the age of victim and the sickness of human mind. This seems fine. When you say that a foreigner got raped in India, you are emphasizing that somebody has just smeared upon the India’s face and the crime also was against a guest of India, which also seems fine. You just showed that this rape can be seen in another perspective too, and this perspective is related to severity of crime. But when you repeatedly say that a female of this particular community/caste was raped, you just increased the rift, which many politicians have been digging since ages. You just showed that this rape can also be seen as a crime of upper caste towards lower caste.  And I don’t see any point in increasing the rift in society just make the news more spicy and eye catching.

You should start to see these things in more generic way, as crime arising from excessive male domination, unemployment, poverty, lack of judicial system, societal norms, criminal mind etc.  Or crime of stronger part of society towards weak irrespective of gender or caste etc.

The word “Indian Origin” and Patriot media

We often see in news headlines that "Indian origin guy/gal did this/that".  When we use the word "Indian origin" as first to word of headline what are we emphasizing here?  Someone did something great, or a guy whose ancestors (or maybe guy himself once upon a time in history) belonged to India has done something.  Actually there is nothing wrong in news content. But when we see these kind of things over and over as the first two words of headlines repeated everywhere, we may also tend to infer a meaning that an Indian origin guy who is/was not in general as competent as some counterparts  people of the world has finally achieved something. Now we should show the world that people of Indian origin are also capable of doing something great.  Are you not also implying your country's past or present as suppressed, underdeveloped, needy by flashing it over and over?  

Yeah, there is no harm in feeding people with complete information, but news also modulates the thinking of people especially by the portion emphasized in it. So we have option of mentioning it in the news content. By doing this you may be hurting the  guy in question as if the reason behind his discovery is Indian origin(which may be true statistically but here we are talking something different). Also it’s true that directly or indirectly there may be people from other country involved in that project.  

Yeah, India is rising and news media wants to shout and get attention about it. But there is need to take mature and balanced approach in this globalized world if you are media. You may be read by other part of world also.

This is similar to the approach which media has taken on Indian cricket team.  Only difference being that is they don’t get account of failures in the quest which is actually not needed in these cases.

In most cases, when a guy is of Indian origin, this fact itself describes the incapability India in keeping him Indian. And you are sort of giving credit to his origin.

If this continues, there is a chance that the world “Indian origin” will become a subject of mockery in few parts of world. Given the case that hard working quality (is it actually inherent quality?)   of Indians has already become a joke among many more things associated with Indians. But there are few comments made in Nation which can't be taken just as joke. Especially in this scenario they leaks some bitter truth.  What do you think?