Time flies when you are with old friends\u2026.and it\u2019s even\nmore fun when you poke fun at them\u2026it\u2019s a lot better than the virtual poking on\nFacebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So here I was spending one of my evening\u2019s helping a\nfriend\u2019s daughter update her work profile as she was applying to some\nuniversities abroad, I happened to pick up a sheet of paper that had her\ndetails written on it however what caught my attention was the \u201cLanguages\nknown\/spoken\u201d bit on her resume\u2026she had\ncancelled Hindi and Gujrat and written \u201cENGLISH\u201d,yeah just the way I wrote it\nhere, and my instant remark to that was \u201cfirang\u201d\u2026and we had a hearty laugh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later during the day while I was arranging some books\n\u201cthe resume\u201d incident just flashed in front of me and enthused the thought of\nwriting this article in my mind. I happened to google the world \u201clanguages\u201d to\nhelp me perk up my knowledge on the subject. While surfing the net I came\nacross a frequently used term \u2013 \u201cVernacular\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019d like to quote Wikipedia \u2013 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThe term vernacular<\/a> is\nderived from the Latin<\/a> vernaculus<\/em>,\nmeaning “domestic, native, and indigenous”; from verna<\/em>,\nmeaning “native slave<\/a>” or “home-born slave”\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Native and Home\nborn slave, I think that title suits some of us the best because that\u2019s the\neffect globalization has had on us. Mother tongue has just become a dialect for\nmost of us,its lost the respect a language should be given and the credit for\nthat goes to the universally acclaimed language \u201cEnglish\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n English no doubt\ntakes you places,but that\u2019s because when we walk into a book store\/library we\nalways pick up a book written in English and if by any chance we pick up a book\nwritten in any of the twenty two languages given by the government of India, we\nare made to feel so very \u201ctacky\u201d I\u2019d say.<\/p>\n\n\n\n English was a language used by the rulers of our country, we struggled to get freedom from the British rule however celebrate the hard earned victory every year through speeches written in their language, what an irony!!!\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n The\nbigger irony is that the British Government before independence proposed to\nestablish a National Academy of Letters to help set high literary standards,\nto foster and co-ordinate literary activities in all the Indian languages and\nto promote through them all the cultural unity of the country and hence in\nDecember 1952, Sahitya Academy, India’s National Academy of Letters came into\nexistence. It is the\ncentral institution for literary dialogue, publication and promotion in the\ncountry and the only institution that undertakes literary activities in\ntwenty-four Indian languages, including English. Over the 56 years of its\ndynamic existence, it has ceaselessly endeavored to promote good taste and\nhealthy reading habits, to keep alive the intimate dialogue among the various\nlinguistic and literary zones and groups through seminars, lectures, symposia,\ndiscussions, readings and performances, to increase the pace of mutual\ntranslations through workshops and individual assignments and to develop a\nserious literary culture through the publications of journals, monographs,\nindividual creative works of every genre, anthologies, encyclopedias,\ndictionaries, bibliographies, who’s who of writers and histories of literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bravo!!! I must\nsay to the great recognition Sahitya Academy has bought to our Indian\nLiterature especially the numerous efforts infused by them to \u201c promote good\ntaste and healthy reading habits\u201d and create great writers like \u201cPremchand\u201d,\n\u201cMulk Raj Anand\u201d, \u201cVikram Seth\u201d,\u201dKushwant Singh\u201d and so on\u2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sarcastic is what I wanted to be when I read the description about the achievements of the Sahitya Akademi,to me the achievements can be classified in just two categories, one creating a name for themselves and two, reaping the benefits of being a government recognized institution, because if they really did what they claimed to have done.The youth of today wouldn\u2019t have to google to get information about the beautiful colossal of Indian literature.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since I\u2019ve\nmentioned the word \u201cyouth\u201d, I\u2019m of the opninion that nothing better than media\ncan be the voice of today\u2019s youth, however it\u2019s the media that propagates Indian\nliterature and languages in a completely different dimension. If one happens to\nswitch over channel\u2019s which I believe is one of the most common task of our day,\nyou\u2019d know what I\u2019m talking about \u2013 it rankles my mind to the extent that I\u2019ve\nsometimes wanted to get into the television set and tell the character on the\nscreen the right pronunciation and meaning of the word he\/she is trying to use,\nphew!! I wonder how that\u2019d be like\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n If I\u2019m allowed to take a step ahead, I would want to walk up to the members of some political party and give them a pat on the back for the mayhem created just to keep alive the language of the state and giving it, its due respect. Have you seen the ad which says \u2013 \u201cjaago grahak jaago\u201d,I want to rephrase it a little if I may and put it forth as,\u201d jaago bharat jaago\u201d because the day ain\u2019t \u00a0far enough when the many languages bequeathed to us by the constitution of India would just be dialects and we\u2019d struggle to form the simplest sentence in Hindi which happens to be our national language. Time we contemplated over the expression \u2013 \u201cMera Bharat Mahan\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Time flies when you are with old friends\u2026.and it\u2019s even more fun when you poke fun at them\u2026it\u2019s a lot better than the virtual poking on Facebook. So here I was spending one of my evening\u2019s helping a friend\u2019s daughter update her work profile as she was applying to some universities abroad, I happened to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2637,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[30,121,6],"yst_prominent_words":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","blog_post_layout_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","full":""},"categories_names":{"3":{"name":"Musings","link":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/category\/musing\/"}},"tags_names":{"30":{"name":"india","link":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/tag\/india\/"},"121":{"name":"languages","link":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/tag\/languages\/"},"6":{"name":"musings","link":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/tag\/musings\/"}},"comments_number":"4","wpmagazine_modules_lite_featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":"","cvmm-medium":"","cvmm-medium-plus":"","cvmm-portrait":"","cvmm-medium-square":"","cvmm-large":"","cvmm-small":"","full":""},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2636\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2637"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2636"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/decodinglives.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}