Hi!
How you doing? I will like to give some updates before I proceed to what I actually want to write today. Summer vacation is over and its been a month since we came back to kgp. Its all good. Things change and so do we. So, this year is gonna be different, I now know what I want to after graduation and so, it seems comparatively easy. :) Okay... so lets go to the topic!
The Indian census of 1961 recognised 1,652 different languages in India. And world has nearly 6700 languages... most of them spoken only by community of less than 1000! Even if we leave these languages aside, there remain many languages which people have developed, gone deep inside and have expressed their best thoughts and feelings. What is bad in having such a huge number of languages is people miss out on so many damn things!! It feels too sad to see others and yourself miss out like this. I learnt or, say felt it strongly when I was in chennai... Here is the incident -
I was in chennai for internship, and had a Malayali co-intern. She was from kerela and for graduation, staying in chennai which is again full of people knowing her language. She never came across other languages except a bit of english which was only langauge we communicated in. She did not know hindi and of course there was no chance of her knowing my mother tongue - marathi. I din't know hers either. One nice rainy night, I was listening to Kishore Kumar songs, she entered my room. I was smiling thinking nothing but the meaning of that beautiful song! She asked me why was I smilling? I told her that the song completely gave me some kind of feel. She asked about it. I explained her the meaning. She liked it and smiled too! I was kept thinking and felt sad - damn! She is missing all lovely songs by Kishore Kumar, Gulzar, Javed Aktar and many many more who put more meaning to the music. Who made it simple for us to understand lives. She missed out all these nice songs. I couldn't help myself and ended up telling her meaning of nearly 10-12 good Hindi/ Marathi songs. She started wishing she knew hindi and to my surprise, Marathi too! I thought, may be we don't miss out because, every language has such songs and may be they are similar in meaning. I asked her to explain me meaning of some Malayalam song. She did it. That song was beautiful too. I asked for one more. And we continued...
But, then I realized, every culture is different and so are thoughts of people with different culture. Each language definitely has some unique beauty to express certain feelings which to not give same impact after there best translation too. May be it does not matter much as there are many other things to do in life but, it is all sad!! We do miss out on something. Each language has its own beauty and you can understand it only when you know the language. I felt very strong about things she missed by not knowing hindi and marathi and what all I missed not knowing Malayalam(first time in my life I had such a respect and desire to know some South Indian language) and of course I could sort of imagine how much more we were missing out together not knowing any other language of the world enough to understand it's songs and literature.
