Twisted by tongue
I’m weeping while I’m typing this piece. No, I’m not the sentimental kind for sure. Just that my amma feels it’s a cool trait to cut onions sitting nearer to my PC. Funnily enough, she isn’t shedding a single teardrop. Perhaps mothers have struck a secret deal with the most consumed vegetable on this multi-tongued planet!
Speaking of tongues, what language are your dreams made up of? It could be very different from the one you think in. Better still, it could be anything from your mother tongue to English. Yeah, I do realise that English has become the debut language of a considerable amount of Indian populace. But we can’t overrule the reality that English is and will always be a foreign language. They won’t ever accept us the way we embraced their so-called language of angels. Having said that, it wasn’t forced on us so the colonial baggage is just a historical conjecture. On the contrary, English makes us feel better about ourselves but then, so does ignorance. Progress has a price to pay. However, what gets my goat is the fact that there are some of us who are in perpetual denial of where they come from. They simply detach themselves from every shred of ethnicity as if it’s an incurable disease. They feel that it’s a natural side-effect of being cosmopolitan. Anyway like they say, to each his own. But if that is so, it’s high time we owned what is truly ours. After all, a language doesn’t take as much time to perish as it takes to birth and evolve. Especially in a dream city shrouded in absolute fakeness.
Still weeping because my Tulu isn’t good enough for amma to acknowledge the kind of pain my untrained eyes are battling as of now. Or maybe she just wants me to stop being such a smartass — who loves preaching others on how things are — and log out of the virtual world to go take a bath on a Sunday.