It's just not English

Inclusion of newfangled words - which have never been part of English - into the official reference for Scrabble players lays open the possibility of any random sequence of letters being sanctified as English. The move undermines the very language Scrabble is played in, and the implications are disheartening.



Scrabble is more than a game. Nearly four million games are sold around the world annually. Of these, parents encourage children to play Scrabble because it helps them learn or improve their English. Adults too play the game to refine their own language skills. Scrabble's success lies in making learning fun. But that educative function, so engaging to young and old alike, is being sacrificed. Some words included are not just slang, but also misspellings. Besides sowing confusion, this trend will lead to pointless duplication of perfectly adequate words. What's wrong with 'girl'? Why must there also be 'grrl'?



That Indian words like gobi and aloo can also be used shouldn't be celebrated as a sign of our soft power. Rather, it signifies the undermining of the English language, which has perfectly good equivalents for the terms borrowed from us. Relying on Hindi words can make people not learn or use the English variants. That's counterproductive for Indians especially. The most productive sectors of our economy depend on our being able to speak English, and Scrabble is a good, fun way to hone our skills. Grammar too goes out in the expanded lexicon. Words like 'myspace' and 'wiki' are proper nouns, yet find a place in Scrabble. English is a means of communication between diverse peoples the world over. The more it's debased, stretched beyond recognition to include alien words, the less it will be able to serve this function.

Bin Laden’s Killing as Seen From India

As the news of Osama bin Laden’s death spread around the world, the jubilation in India had as much to do with where he was found as the fact he had been dispatched.

The headline in The Times of India read: “US Kills Osama, Blows Pak Cover.” Mail Today announced: “Osama Killed, Pak Wounded.” India Today described Pakistan on its cover as “Terroristan.”

Many Indians relished the fact that Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, in a large mansion, in the company of a wife U.S. officials described as “young.”

That he maintained such a life in a garrison town two hours from the Pakistani capital appeared to confirm India’s official position that it is in Pakistan’s nature to protect terrorists. In the world according to Indians, the myth of Pakistan as an ally in the war against terror died that night with Bin Laden. The chalk outlines on the floor of the Abbottabad mansion would include, besides the contours of Bin Laden’s last pose, the map of Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s death in Pakistan was particularly satisfying for those Indians who have resented what they took to be the world’s propensity to lump India and Pakistan together.

Modern India, despite its horrible flaws, they would say, is a product of democracy, new capitalism and the unambiguous moral values of Hinduism, which does not define humanity as Hindus and so could not be bothered to call anybody infidels or try to convert them. (There are zealots among Hindus, but their numbers are comparatively few, and their influence has been diminished by the Indian preoccupation with prosperity, whose currency is peace.)

By contrast, they would point out, in Pakistan this year, a woman was sentenced to death for blasphemy. A liberal who protested the country’s blasphemy law was killed and the killer greeted by his supporters with rose petals.

The attacks in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, did suggest crucial cultural and political differences between India and Pakistan, but in the Indian view, America’s circumstances led it to reward Pakistan. With both the United States and China wooing Pakistan and heavily arming it in their own interests, Indians could only watch as their neighbor reaped the benefits.

Bin Laden’s death in Abbottabad need not mean that the United States will distance itself from Pakistan, or that India would want that. But many here believe that at least now, the outside world is viewing Pakistan’s chaotic political and military leadership and its intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, much the way Indians have long viewed them. That is why they relish Bin Laden’s death.

When Pakistan’s former president and military chief, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, appeared on Indian television, his interviewer, Karan Thapar, told him that the fact that the C.I.A. did not share the intelligence about Bin Laden with Pakistan was “a slap on the face of Pakistan.” General Musharraf nodded reluctantly.

Mr. Thapar then said Pakistan had been “caught with its pants down.” General Musharraf, who had once led Pakistan to war against India, wryly responded, “Well, aren’t you enjoying using these terms?”

Mr. Thapar then insisted that the Bin Laden episode was not an embarrassment, but a “humiliation” for Pakistan. General Musharraf let out a sad chuckle.

Setbacks are nothing new for Pakistan’s military. It fought three disastrous wars with India. According to India, its neighbor has since the 1980s sought vengeance by unleashing terrorists on Indian soil. Pakistan has consistently denied this and accuses India of killing its own civilians through terror.

When Mr. Thapar asked General Musharraf why the Pakistani military could not detect U.S. choppers as they flew in from the west and remained in the country’s airspace for more than two hours, General Musharraf said, matter-of-factly, that most of Pakistan’s radars “are focused more towards your side.”

On the streets of Pakistan, among ordinary people, India provides less cause for concern.

Mohammed Hanif, a Pakistani journalist and the author of the novel “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” a satire of Pakistan’s military, said in an interview: “People of Pakistan don’t wake up in the morning fearing an Indian attack. They wake up fearing a bomb going off in a mosque or a bazaar. But Pakistan’s army’s reason for existence is India. Even after fighting its own Muslim brothers on its own turf for 10 years, and losing more soldiers than it ever has in a confrontation with India, Pakistan’s army remains India-centric.”

The Indian government understands the complexities of Pakistan, but the average Indian sees no distinction between those who control Pakistan and its people. He imagines a nation that blasts Indians to bits. That is unfortunate, because Indians who travel there are struck by the aspiration of ordinary Pakistanis to be warm to Indians. And Pakistan is a vastly different country from what most Indians imagine.

For instance, most Indians might find it hard to believe that there are Hindu temples in Pakistan and that they are not apologetic shrines where persecuted minorities hide and pray. They are as vibrant as temples in India and are sustained by Hindus who have prospered in Pakistan. In fact, outside one temple in Karachi, a man stood at the door and refused to let in Muslims who had begged him for a quick peek. He was unmoved, but he let me in because I was Indian.

Life&style:

=>Wipe off wrinkles with hot-wax mask

A hot-wax mask is nowadays the latest rage in skin care – the paraffin wax facial is a thermal mask billed as the quickest way to a "non-surgical facelift". Celebrity facialist Emma Hardie came up with the idea of the mask, which is painted on to the skin and then kept warm under infrared light, after an hour's intensive massage. During the massage, she uses moisturising oils and massage to stimulate the skin cells and a ''deep-tissue'' kneading technique to give softer, plumper skin. And then comes the mask, which helps the skin to absorb the moisturising oils and soothes and relaxes the facial muscles to help release tension and leave the skin bright and glowing.

The treatment, which costs 160 pounds, is the quickest route to a non-surgical facelift and promises "instant and noticeable results after one session." Sophie Dahl, Denise Van Outen and Anjelica Huston are amongst few of her celeb customers. "This facial is a wonderful treat for a cold, winter's evening and the warm wax helps you feel like you're in the Tropics. The massage and wax helps to boost circulation in the skin and helps to relax the facial muscles," The Daily Mail quoted Hardie as saying.

She also claims that the treatment can help with migraine relief, sinus problems, head, neck and shoulder tension, depression, menopause, grief and insomnia. "Wax is very softening and it's very good as a skin treatment. ''We use it a lot on dry hands and chapped skin. It helps to oxygenate and detoxify the skin," she said. Alice Hart-Davis, a beauty journalist, said that wax was widely recognised for its skin-softening effects in the beauty world. "It is usually used in manicures and pedicures, but there's no denying that it could also work very well as part of a facial," she said.

Will The Real Sita Stand Up?

During Ram Rajya, we're told, the people were a contented lot. There was no shortage of food and other material comforts and sickness was rare. People lived happy and long lives. Rama himself often toured the city to check and inquire their welfare.

Yet, in many parts of eastern and southern India, the Ramayana is not considered on par with the Mahabharata. Rama is viewed, at best, as a heroic but ultimately flawed protagonist; at worst, a male chauvinist. One reason for this atypical perception is because he made Sita undergo the agnipariksha, trial by fire, to test her purity after being abducted by Ravana. However, a careful study of the peculiar circumstances and background that led to the fire-trial might help us see Rama in a different light.

When Goddess Earth saw the destruction wrought by Ravana, she prayed to Brahma the Creator to rescue her. Brahma and Goddess Earth thereafter jointly invoked Vishnu who promised to incarnate in order to kill Ravana. Vishnu became Rama, his consort Lakshmi became Sita and Seshnag became Lakshman.

Vishnu and Lakshmi had never been separated in previous incarnations. Mandodari, Ravana's wife, knew that Rama and Sita were divine and inseparable and that anyone daring to separate them would be destroyed. She'd repeatedly begged Ravana to let Sita go back to Rama but in vain.

In his incarnation as Rama, Vishnu had to perforce get separated from Lakshmi since Sita had to be abducted by Ravana in order for Rama to kill him. And so it came to pass that before the abduction took place Agni, the fire god, came to Rama and said, "The aim of your incarnation is to destroy Ravana, and Sita is meant to be the cause for that since Ravana will come and carry her away. So entrust Sita with me and I will make a "Maya Sita" for you to keep. After Ravana's death when she enters fire to prove her purity, I will return the real Sita to you." Hearing this, Rama agreed.

Thereafter through intense meditation Agni created a look-alike Sita which was not an illusion or facsimile but a real double with a real name, history and destiny like any other Puranic personality. (Interestingly, the reference to Maya Sita is available in regional versions of Ramayana but not in Valmiki's account.) Thus, the Sita who was abducted by Ravana was not the actual Sita but a version of her and, more importantly, Rama had full knowledge of this although no one else knew at the time - not even Lakshman.

As foretold, the real Sita came out at the time of Maya Sita entering the fire to prove her purity and the Maya Sita vanished in the flames. To substantiate the role of Maya Sita and real Sita, Tulsi Das in Ramcharitmanas mentions that when the real Sita came out of the Agni she was wearing the jewellery given to her by Arundhati before her abduction and not the jewellery given by Ravana in Lanka.

Certain schools of thought even believe that Rama specifically asked (Maya) Sita to take the agnipariksha so that he could get back his original Sita, and not necessarily to prove her chastity. However, this is often tempered by adding the rider that at the time people would not have accepted Sita as their queen if she had not passed the trial by fire.

THE INDIAN ACCENT

While many Indians temporarily transform into Hollywood-types, using words like Eye-raq and Af-gainistan, there is the Indian stereotype that exists and entertains in the West. Remember the sardarji in the hilarious 'Mind Your Language' series or Apu the shopkeeper in 'The Simpsons'. India's love for the present continuous, probably spread abroad by our army of IT professionals, has established an image. In Anurag Mathur's side-splitting book The Inscrutable Americans, the protagonist's letter is a perfect example. "Younger brother, I am having so many things to tell you that I am not knowing where to start. " But still, right or wrong, we can talk English, we can walk English and we can murder English. We are like this only!


HAPPY HOLIDAZED

Ever encountered a person who develops a Sean Connery accent overnight? Chances are he's back from a 10-day vacation in Thailand and he picked up the accent from the 5-minute conversation with a British stewardess. With international flights getting cheaper by the day, the path to a phoney accent has gotten much shorter. It allows Chunnu's mummy from the neighbourhood to have a quick 'hauliday' in 'Canaada'. And when she returns, she startles you with a "Oh I say, how've you been o ld chap?" Apparently, one can barter common sense for a British drawl a broad. These folks believe, when in Rome do as the Romans, and when back home, bring Rome along.




FROM COWBELT TO COWBOY

Joyeeta Jindal was shocked when her friend Rajan, who had difficulty pronouncing words like potatoes and pizza, suddenly developed an American twang and asked her out on a pizza date. Concerned for his well being and stunned by his discovery of the 'Z' alphabet, she probed a little only to discover that Rajan - who hails from a small town in UP - had just finished training at a call centre. His new favourite word was awesome (pronounced 'aasum' ) and he greeted people with a 'howdy'. The BPO industry has single-handedly transformed a generation into a junk-eating, junk-spewing pseudo-American society. To think that some years ago, everyone wanted to go to 'Amarica'. Well, 'Amarica' has come to us.

WRONG TIME, WRONG PLACE

Some geniuses goof up on the timing factor, not knowing when and where to use their accent. They will often expend their limited vocabulary with the right sounds and fancy accent on a poor waiter or a salesman in a small shop. The victim of their fancy tirade may just stare back or respond with a 'huh?' They don't let such minor details stop them. Of course, when they mingle with their high-society friends, the Oxford accent goes out of the window. Crude, profanitylaced banter is the order of the day. Folks, if you can't time a phoney accent, you don't deserve an accent at all. Try normal. Achcha hai!

FIRANG DE BASANTI

Skin colour, it seems, often decides the choice of fake accents some people use. White skin means they have to talk 'Amrikan' or 'British'. Never mind the fact that they may be talking to someone from Italy or Jordon or Argentina. For non-Caucasian countries, broken Hinglish is enough, sometimes even interspersed with racist comments muttered under the breath. Overall, there almost seems to be an irrepressible desire to impress the 'firang' with the accent they picked up from watching Rambo-III some 12 times. A close encounter with the foreign kind probably releases some enzyme in the brain, which temporarily obscures the logic compartment.

SILLY CELLULOID

How deeply the Western stereotype is embedded in our psyche can be gauged from a dose of pre- '90s Bollywood films. A foreigner in a film, usually a villain with a ghastly scar, would always be fluent in Hindi but speak in a silly accent, rolling the 'R's and doing away with the gender, as if to scream at the viewer: "See, I am foreigner!" Separately, a look at the reality shows on TV shows another affliction in celebrities. It's the use of the term 'You all', pronounced "Y'all", Harlem style. It's frequently used by judges on TV and is often followed by the word 'both'.
"Y'all both were very good today!"
"Oh, " it dawns on the contestant, "so they mean all two of us". Y'all is well.

SHOP TALK

Necessity is the mother of invention, and also accents. Some people are forced to develop foreign drawls out of business compulsions. Salesmen in Jaipur often switch easily between Hindi and heavily accented English without missing a beat. The customer always comes first. In Goa, touts for adventure sports and hotels run after Russians screaming Da and Nyet. And one can now discover shopkeepers speaking Hebrew in Manali. If putting the customer at ease means adopting his accent, so be it. The BPO industry is not the only one with business sense, eh?

Reference:

1989 : A TURNING POINT IN POLITICAL HISTORY

By Shri L.K. Advani , Working President, NDA : Francis Fukuyama is a bright political thinker but many disagreed with him when in 1992 he wrote a book titled “The End of History and the Last Man”, in which he observed:

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold war, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of the mankind’s ideological evolution and universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”In the context of the last round of Assembly elections in our country whose results have been announced last week, the most significant result is the end of CPI (M) rule in West Bengal.

The left front led by CPI (M) has been in office in West Bengal since 1977. No other party has had the good fortune of ruling any state uninterruptedly for 34 years as the CPI (M) has done. And yet its achievement in terms of the State’s developmental growth and people’s welfare in the field of education and health has been conspicuously dismal.

Mamata has carved a place for herself in the history of West Bengal by achieving something that no one else has been able to achieve earlier, smash the stranglehold of the Marxists on this state.

Today BJP is not in office at the Centre, but we are in office in seven states; the NDA is ruling two other states besides.

On the basis of our six year long experience in New Delhi under Shri Vajpayee (1998 -2004) and the nine Assemblies where we presently are holding the reins of office, I can say that if either at the centre or in any state we get such an extraordinary opportunity as the leftists have had, or even continuously for just one and a half to two decades, it can be confidently claimed that the state population’s full potential can be brought to the surface, and the country as a whole brought to the level of other advanced countries of the world.

Problems like poverty, illiteracy, lack of healthcare, inadequacy of power, roads, other aspects of infrastructure and even irrigation, etc – all these can certainly become history.

***

I well recall the early years of independence and cannot forget the attitude of arrogance we used to perceive among the leftists who met us. The Jana Sangh was in its infancy at that time. I recall a Kerala Marxist reminding me of the proud boast of the British imperialists. He remarked: “The Britishers used to say: the sun never sets on the British Empire. It is only a matter of time before we also would be able to make the same claim. Already, we are in control of more than half of Europe. Not only in India, but in all the developing countries of Asia it is the Communist ideology which is seen as a beacon of hope for the future!”

As a ringside observer of Indian politics since independence, I hold that 1989 which Fukuyama called the End of History because it was the year which marked the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Dismantling of the U.S.S.R was not the End, but an important Turning Point both in Global History as well as in Indian Political history.

1989 certainly marks the commencement of the decline of Communism as an ideology. In India the decline may have come two decades later, but it has arrived none the less.

***

The BJP was formed at a national conference held at New Delhi on April 5 and 6, 1980. The Conference was preceded by a meeting of the Janata Party’s Central Parliamentary Board on April 4, 1980.

It was at this meeting that the Board took a majority decision to throw out of the Janata Party all former members of Jana Sangh on the ground that all of them were also members of the RSS and this amounted to dual membership, and so disqualified Jana Sangh members from continuing in the Janata Party.

Incidentally, April 4 in 1980 was Good Friday, and April 6 on which BJP was formally founded, an Easter Sunday.

I have often commented on these two dates as conveying a message from the perspective of Christian mythology.

Good Friday is the day on which Jesus Christ is believed to have been crucified, and Easter Sunday the day on which he was resurrected.

The first Lok Sabha election our party had to face after being resurrected as BJP was the 1984 election held just a few weeks after Smt. Gandhi was brutally assassinated by her own security guards.

In this election held in December 1984, the BJP put up 229 candidates. But we won only 2 seats! Even in the first General Election held thirty two years earlier in 1952, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh had won three seats. So, this year marked the lowest point in our graph. In fact at places, I had often commented: this was for us not a Lok Sabha election, but a Shok Sabha election!

But it is no less important for us that the very next election of 1989 became for us the highest point till then. From two seats in 1984, we leaped to 86 in 1989! And after that we never looked back until in 1998 the BJP secured 182 Lok Sabha seats and successfully formed the National Democratic Alliance which ruled the country for six years, till 2004.

Indeed, it is the BJP’s ascendancy in the last two decades that have made Indian polity a bipolar polity with Congress and BJP as the principal poles of national politics.

***

For over six months now, in every nook and corner of the country, just one issue that has dominated all public discourse has been corruption. More and more people have been commenting: the dimensions of the scams that have surfaced have made the common man say: this isn’t the ordinary sarkari corruption we are familiar with; this is nothing short of loot and dakaiti !

When I complimented Jayalalithaji on her victory, I told her that her success would be no doubt very good for her State but this time the principal scam having been the Spectrum Scam, the Tamilnadu outcome has a national significance. If her opponents had won after all that had happened, the message to the country would have been shocking: the electors are totally unconcerned about corruption! Thanks to her achievement, this has not happened.

***

TAILPIECE

In the early years of independence, for us whose ideological grounding has been in cultural nationalism, we naturally reckoned communism as our principal ideological adversary. For book – lovers I would strongly recommend three of the books I had read those days, and which I enjoy reading even now. Two of these books are of fiction and by the same author George Orwell. These are (1) Animal Farm: A fairy tale (2) Nineteen Eighty –Four: A political novel. The first of these books was published in 1945, and the second in 1949.

The third book I wish to commend is not just non-fiction. It is a very moving autobiography, titled WITNESS. The author is Whittaker Chambers who after playing a prominent role in the Communist underground in Washington in the 1930’s painfully broke with communism and the Communist Party in 1938. He resurfaced to become a distinguished writer and editor of Time magazine. This book was first published in 1952.

Former US President Ronald Reagan said about the book: “As long as humanity speaks of virtue and dreams of freedom, the life and writings of Whittaker Chambers will ennoble and inspire.”

L.K. Advani
New Delhi
16 May, 2011

Source : Shri L.K. Advaniji’s latest blog

“Murder in the name of honor!!- Heinous and Atrocious act!”

“17 year old girl, shot dead by father in Pakistan”, Couple killed by family members after love marriage in Haryana”

These are the most published headlines these days in almost all newspapers. Honor killing or honour killing (also known as ‘customary killing’) is the most up surging catastrophe being faced not only in India but all across the world. Honor killing is the murder of a member of a family or social group by other members, due to the belief of the perpetrators (and potentially the wider community), that the victim has brought dishonor to the community. Honor killings are mostly directed against women and girls.


The perceived dishonor is generally the result of victim’s desire to marry by own choice or homosexuality. With modernization, the rate of love marriages might have gone up in the metro cities but reality remains contrary in sub-urban and rural areas. Though one has to admit that majority of the killings take place in rural areas but it has also been seen recently that even metropolitan cities like Delhi and Chennai are not untouched by this abashing crime. Thus, it is clear that honor killing has a vast geographical spread.
Honor killing is definitely a major national challenge, with individual states like Punjab reporting 35 honor killings on an average annually. Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar together report 500-600 annual honor killings on an average in the past 3 years. But, on a wide perspective this social evil is curbing the humanity globally, be it UK or Pakistan or the Middle East.
Over the course of six years, more than 4000 women have died as victims of honor killings in Pakistan from 1999 to 2004. In 2005, the average annual number of honor killings for the whole nation was stated to be more than 10,000 per year, According to women’s rights advocates, the concepts of women as a property, and of honor are so deeply entrenched in the social, economic and political fabric of Pakistan that the government mostly ignores the regular occurrences of women being killed and maimed by their families.
Every year in the UK, officials estimate that at least a dozen women are victims of honor killings, almost exclusively within Asian and Middle Eastern families. Often cases cannot be resolved due to the unwillingness of family, relatives and communities to testify. A 2006 BBC poll for the Asian network in UK found that one in ten of the 500 young Asians polled said that they could condone the murder of someone who dishonored their family.
In April 2008, it came to light that a woman had been killed in Saudi Arabia by her father a few months before for “chatting” to a man on the social networking internet site face book! A girl in Turkey was killed after her family heard a song and thought she had a boyfriend. In 2010, a 16 year girl was buried alive by relatives for befriending boys in South east Turkey, her corpse was found 40 days after she went missing. Ahmet Yildiz, 26, a Turkish psychic’s student who represented his country at National Gay Conference in the United States in 2008 was shot leaving a café in Istanbul.
The above mentioned cases are mere microscopic elaborations of this macroscopic catastrophe. In today’s modern advanced era, such mishaps are matter of contempt and derision. We, as individuals need to unite at social, communal, regional, national and global levels to eradicate this social evil. The mentalities of people all across the globe should be improvised by education and awareness. One of the major reasons of increasing cases of honor killings is that the caste system continues to prevail at its rigid best from the fundamental level of society to the international parameters. Casteism and other orthodox beliefs must be eliminated from the society entirely.


After mass revolts and scrutinizing the increasing number of honor killings, the Supreme Court of India issued notices to the Central Government and six states including UP, Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan to take preventive measures against this social evil.
Alarmed by the rise of honor killings, the government planned to bring a bill in the Monsoon Session of parliament in July, 2010 to provide for deterrent punishment for honor killings. Well, its high time now, nations all across the globe must unify and buckle up to demolish this catastrophic social evil. Strict laws must be enacted and implemented more in observance than in breach, against the perpetrators of this heinous crime.
Remember…no law, no community and no ethics permit humans to write death sentences for fellow humans. Every individual has certain rights to live his/ her life and certain duties towards the society he/she is a part of.

"Where there is no shame, there is no honor, and killing is the most shameful act in the name of honor”