The Reader Is Not Interested In The Story

(First published in Scroll.in, 9 December 2014.)

Some years ago, I was a reporter in the founding team of a new news magazine. When the magazine launched, the marketing team sent journalists an email saying that we could gift four free subscriptions to anyone we liked, but could we please make sure the four recipients fell within the magazine’s TG? Continue reading “The Reader Is Not Interested In The Story”

Why Indian mangoes are better than Pakistani mangoes

(This article has previously appeared in Scroll, Quartz India, The Express Tribune and Dawn in the summers of 2014 and 2015.)

Photo credit: Prabhav Shandilya

I am telling nothing but the truth when I tell you that Indian mangoes are better than Pakistani mangoes. It infuriates me when Pakistanis don’t agree. That makes mangoes an India-Pakistan dispute just like Kashmir. Like a good Indian, I don’t think this needs a referendum. Of course our mangoes are better. How could anyone even think that isn’t the case? Continue reading “Why Indian mangoes are better than Pakistani mangoes”

Why I won’t apologise for being a Macaulayputra

I thought I had written a great essay in the Hindi test, but while returning my paper the Hindi teacher singled me out in the class. “You are using too many Farsi words,” she said in chaste Hindi. She had circled each Farsi word and given me poor marks. For days I wondered what she had meant because I don’t know Farsi. This was not a government-run Hindi-medium school. This was an elite Christian-run English-medium school where the board exams we took were administered not by the state or central education board but by the Anglo-Indian-dominated Council for Indian School Certificate Examinations.

I had many levels of language confusion, perhaps I still do. The Hindi that my schoolmates and I spoke each other with, the Hindi that we spoke at home and in the bazaars was a Hindi that my teacher insisted had too many Farsi words in it – and would penalise me for using it in writing. I identified myself as primarily being a Hindi speaker, and only later did I understand the minor difference between Hindi and Hindustani. Yet Hindi was not my mother tongue. I was the second generation of Punjabi refugee grandparents. My grandparents came from Multan and Lahore and settled in Lucknow. Yet, even my parents didn’t speak any Punjabi. Unlike Bengalis, Punjabis get easily deracinated.



Somebody once shamed me for not knowing Gurmukhi, “the script of your mother tongue”. Yet I discovered that my parents wrote in Nastaliq, the script of Urdu. Yet it wasn’t Urdu but an associated script, Shahmukhi.

More recently, as I made many Pakistani friends over the internet and told them I was a Multani from Lucknow, they asked me with awe if Multanis in India still speak Seraiki. It turns out that there’s a whole Seraiki movement in south Punjab in Pakistan these days. They say they are not Punjabi, that their language isn’t a mere dialect of Punjabi but completely different.

My Punjabi grandparents had settled in Lucknow, a city that was once the most important centre of Urdu as Delhi declined. Yet the Lucknow I grew up in was the capital of Hindi nationalism, where the language of the streets was declared foreign by my Hindi teacher.

Even the Urdu that the Awadh court patronised until the British annexed the province was not the language of the people. The language of the people was Awadhi, of which there seemed to be no trace in Lucknow anymore.

I wasn’t great at English. The year that the Hindi teacher ticked me off for using Farsi words – I must have been 13 – I flunked the English exam because I didn’t understand a word of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. I wondered if people in England still spoke English like that. My parents were educated in Hindi-medium schools. They knew what disadvantages that brought in this world. They were proud of sending me to Christian-run English-medium schools.

We subscribed to two newspapers at home, one Hindi and one English. The Hindi teacher in school often mourned the declining standard of Hindi in the newspapers. The English papers taught me the peculiar Indian newspaper English. Eventually it was in Indian English that I found myself a language. I read RK Narayan, Ruskin Bond and Mulk Raj Anand to find that English could describe the world around me with great ease, something that shuddh Hindi could not. 

Macaulay’s minute and the Rajbhasha committee

I learnt later about Macaulay’s minute (“English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic”) and the English Education Act of 1835 whose purpose was to creating a native ruling class to assist colonisation. I also learnt about the Hindi-Urdu debate and its centrality to the Partition of India, and the Rajbhasha Committee of 1960. It is this committee, both a product and a propagator of Hindi nationalism, that was the reason why the Hindi I was taught felt like a foreign language. The same school taught me Sanskrit for four years. I loved Panini’s rules of grammar, getting a sense of a classical language, using Sanskrit words for “dog” and “fool” as expletives towards friends. This is also how I realised that the shuddh Hindi that was being shoved into our minds drew words from Sanskrit to replace the so-called Farsi words – words with origins outside the Indian subcontinent.

This was an agenda of those who believed in “Hindi Hindu Hindustan”, though ironically none of those three words is indigenous. As school became a distant memory and I didn’t have to read and write the Devnagiri script as though my life depended on it, the Hindi part of me has reduced considerably. Yes, I am a Macaulayputra but please don’t pretend you don’t know who’s to blame. It’s not Thomas Babington Macaulay but the Rajbhasha committee. I speak Indian Hinglish only. It is a more authentic Indian language than the joke that is shuddh Hindi. T

That is not to say my confusion over language is over. I have come to terms with the thought that I will never be flawless in any language. Language mein bohot problem hai. I have often wondered which language I think in. I have to ask myself that question often these days because the Hindi nationalists who are in power tell me I am an elitiya whose mind is colonised by Lord Macaulay. I would say I think in English but feel in Hindi.

Those who champion Hindi  – such as the Rajbhasha Committee –  mostly argue in the name of nationalism. It is our language, national language, official language, mother tongue. Yet the Hindi they promote is an alien language. I don’t even know what my mother tongue is. Hindustani? Hindi? Seraiki? Urdu? Indian English? Awadhi? If my mother tongue is the language my mother speaks, it is Hindustani, and I speak it too.

There is no one mother tongue in India, not even in the Hindi heartland. People speak Marwari and Bhojpuri, Gondi and Brajbhasha, Maithili and Mewari, Bundeli and Garhwali. This is why the Hindustani poetry of Amir Khusro, written 800 years ago, is more naturally intelligible to me than the gibberish Sanskritised Hindi that my government tells me is my language. Those who condemn me as a colonised, deracinated elitist who uses English as a tool of social domination must ask themselves, for instance, why Macaulayputras like me love watching Hindi cinema and hum Hindi songs all day.

It is not only the English-speaking whose minds need decolonisation. The nationalism of Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan was created by and in response to colonisation. Modern nationalism itself came from Europe, thanks to the colonial enterprise. The decolonisation of language would be an artificial one, real decolonisation would require us to question nationalism. English was not only the language of colonisation but also central to the Indian freedom movement. Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Jinnah and so many others wrote in English. The Indian Constitution was first written in English, borrowing and making better ideas from Britain, the United States and elsewhere. India was imagined in English. The colonisers brought many things to India, such as tea. When they left, tea was still a drink of the elites. Can you imagine telling someone at a chai shop to stop drinking chai garam chai to decolonise themselves? That is how ridiculous the attack against Indian English is.

To promote Hindi, don’t promote it

If Hindi nationalists want to promote Hindi, they should learn from the history of English. The English language has developed, thrived and become the lingua franca of the world not by closing itself but by being open to influences from all over the world. If early English borrowed words from Latin, today’s English is a language juggernaut by having borrowed local words from Macaulay’s putras. Hindi nationalists should see the “Farsi” words that are used in English today, many of them having made it into the Queen’s language via India. They should read Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, a delicious book that the British are happy to read even today. All successful languages are mongrel languages that allow themselves natural, organic evolution through those who use it. This means not being insecure, nativist and xenophobic about foreign words.

In 2011, a bureaucrat with the backing of the Urdu-speaking prime minister Manmohan Singh Kohli, sent out a circular asking central government departments to use simpler Hindi. She gave examples. For instance, she said, the sentence “Tankan aivam ashulipi pariksha ke pariksharthi swagat-patal par panjikaran karayenge” would be a lot more comprehensible if it were expressed as, “Typing aur shorthand exam ke ummeedwar reception par registration karayenge.” I don’t know if good sense prevailed, but it is never too late for Hindi nationalists to learn.

The Rajbhasha Committee worries about government institutions such as the Indian Railways continuing to use English. They want to promote the use of Hindi by doing such things which are rewarding officials who use Hindi. They should ask themselves why they need to promote a language if it is the mother tongue of the people. All that the Rajbhasha Committee needs to do to promote Hindi is to dissolve itself, and all that Hindi nationalists need to do to popularise Hindi is to swallow their nationalism. If Narendra Modi wants to promote Hindi, he should go to his constituency Varanasi and pick up a newspaper called iNext, published by the Dainik Jagran group for the young reader. It is a bilingual paper that uses both Roman and Devangiri scripts, the Hindi and English languages, sometimes in the same article.

iNext newspaper – Hindi and English together

(An earlier version of this article first appeared Scroll, 8 August 2014.)

What India can learn from Nepal

By Shivam Vij

(This article by me first appeared in Scroll on 6 May 2015.)

With large parts of a small country flattened by an earthquake, Nepal again comes across in Indian eyes as a small country that can get by only with a little help from friends. Nepal is this conflict-ridden poor country that hasn’t been able to frame a new Constitution for eight years now, has ego issues with India, plays the China card before New Delhi, and so on. Nepal’s image as a country that can’t manage itself is reinforced by the constant political instability in Kathmandu, because the politics is too bitter. Continue reading “What India can learn from Nepal”

How DDLJ ruined my generation

First published in Scroll.in on 29 November 2014.

Like most Bollywood films, Dilwale Dhulania Le Jayenge ends unrealistically. The film ends with the girl’s father letting her go with her suitor, after having forever decided how she will live her life and who she will marry. “Ja Simran ja,” he says at the railway station, “jee le apni zindagi.” Go live your life. She runs as the train had begun leaving, catches Shah Rukh Khan’s hand and we get one of the most iconic Bollywood scenes.

While the happy ending makes the viewer happy, the overwhelming message of the film is inescapable: if your parents don’t let you marry who you want, don’t run away. Convince them. The obvious implication is that if they are not convinced, eloping against their wishes is not an option. Continue reading “How DDLJ ruined my generation”

Vinod Mehta on the sinking credibility of journalists and why NDTV banned him

First published in Scroll.in on 29 November 2014.

Veteran editor Vinod Mehta was promoted in 2012 to the ceremonial post of editorial chairman of theOutlook group. That was two years after he published the Radia tapes story in Outlook magazine. On the eve of the publication of his second set of memoirs, Editor Unplugged: Media, Magnates, Netas and Me, he spoke to Scroll.in about the state of the media. This is the first of a two-part interview.

It’s surprising you have joined Twitter, considering you recently wrote that social media and you are strangers.
For the moment, flogging my book is my number one priority. Continue reading “Vinod Mehta on the sinking credibility of journalists and why NDTV banned him”

Had I spoken my mind on Bal Thackeray’s death, TV stations would have been burned: Vinod Mehta

First published in Scroll.in on 30 November 2014.

Vinod Mehta, editorial chairman of the Outlook group, published a bestselling autobiography,Lucknow Boy, two years ago. He then felt he had more to say. His new book, Editor Unplugged: Media, Magnates, Netas and Me, will be released by Arundhati Roy and Arnab Goswami in Delhi on December 12. In this free-wheeling interview around the book, he speaks to Scroll.in about a range of subjects. The first part of this interview was published yesterday.

You’ve republished your biographies of Meena Kumari and Sanjay Gandhi, but not your first book, about your early years in Bombay.
I wrote it when I was 26. Some of the contents of the book…My mother, who is dead now, was ashamed when she read it. I wrote in that book about many things which a young man of 26 years would write. About his bohemian life, his womanising, etcetera. You don’t care at that age what you write. I still have a copy of the book and the publishers are chasing me for it. Continue reading “Had I spoken my mind on Bal Thackeray’s death, TV stations would have been burned: Vinod Mehta”

Between the bathroom and the kitchen, there is caste

First published in Scroll.in on 1 December 2014.

A new survey shows that untouchability is still rampant in India. This is important because many like to pretend caste is a thing of the past.

The survey of over 42,000 households across India by the National Council of Applied Economic Research and the University of Maryland shows that 27% of India still practices untouchability. More than one in every four people.

Even in rural India, there is awareness that caste discrimination is politically incorrect. So if you ask people if they practice it, they will probably claim that they don’t. Travelling as a journalist in north India, I have often heard people say, “Here there is no caste.” Ask them specific questions about inter-caste relations, and the lie is exposed. Continue reading “Between the bathroom and the kitchen, there is caste”

The reader is not interested in the story

First published in Scroll.in on 9 December 2014.

Some years ago, I was a reporter in the founding team of a new news magazine. When the magazine launched, the marketing team sent journalists an email saying that we could gift four free subscriptions to anyone we liked, but could we please make sure the four recipients fell within the magazine’s TG?

I wondered what TG meant. The only TG I knew was transgendered. The marketing team explained that the TG they were referring to was Target Group. Our Target Group wasn’t merely SEC A++ as with most English language media. (SEC? Ah, socio-economic category.) There was more to the definition of our TG. The magazine’s ideal reader was someone whose monthly household income was Rs 2 lakh. Some months later they felt that was too ambitious, so reduced it to Rs 1.5 lakh. Wait, there was yet more. There was a category called bull’s eye. We’d hit bull’s eye if we could capture the attention of the reader who lived in one of the big metros, spent weekends in places such as malls where disposable income is spent, had a smart phone (which wasn’t yet ubiquitous), took at least one foreign holiday a year and had a “Segment C” car (which cost above Rs 5.5 lakh in those days). Continue reading “The reader is not interested in the story”

In defence of Uber: Is the government passing the buck?

First published in Scroll.in on 10 December 2014.

2014 was the year of the app. Come to think of it, there is no major life activity that is not being overtaken by smartphone apps. Ordering food, going to the movies, calling a cab, dating, instant messaging and forwarding inane jokes, shopping, news, posting selfies, watching online videos ‒ all of it is now through your apps. The most popular apps for those activities are Zomato, BookMySHow, Uber, Tinder, Whatsapp, Flipkart, NDTV or Times of India, Instagram and YouTube. Apart from the obligatory Facebook and Twitter. If you are a young urban professional in a big Indian city, chances are you have most of these apps on your phone. Continue reading “In defence of Uber: Is the government passing the buck?”