That
day I had an opportunity to watch a program on television and I found one girl
to be quite an interesting “creature”. The moment she caught hold of the mike,
the very moment she caught me up in a trance. After hearing her melodiously
accented voice I kept on thinking “Why in the world would someone talk in
English when it was clearly it’s a show in Urdu???” and from that moment on I
kept on thinking may be English has slowly and gradually, well not that slowly
but still, changed or rather transformed from being the “official” language to
becoming the most widely used language for show-off.
Have you ever noticed how the
younger lot, whenever you meet them, try to converse in as much English as they
possibly can? If you notice now a days the youth seems to be using a set of
words including “basically”, “literally”, “obviously”, “loser”, “dude” and a
long list of other words that one would most widely and abundantly find in the
old Hollywood movies or in English cartoons. Not that I’m saying that the youth
is turning into cartoons, I mean that would be just wrong, wouldn’t it?
So, carrying on, today you would
find all the younger lot trying to use as much English in their conversations
as they possibly can. They kind of glow up whenever they meet a person who
starts in English like may be it is a dream come true for them. And the moment
they start off you would hear a humungous variety of accents each different in
its own beautiful and charming way, mostly freaking out the person that they
are talking to i.e. in the case of the other one being a poor soul of my type
who uses English just to get through this cruel phase for “official” purposes.
The thing to notice is how proud they feel when they talk in English, just by
the way they move their hands and roll their eyes, you can actually tell that
they feel very heightened that may be just may be they are putting up quite an
impression on the person in front of them.
Do not take the impression that I
am an “English hater” of some sort but today we have made it a medium of
conversation not for “official” purposes but for the sole purpose of feeding
the inner fantasy that we or well, a lame blame, globalization has gifted us
that may be if we speak in English it might make us look more educated and of a
status higher than that of others. Truly, English is the language that can be
spoken by the educated class only, i.e. in the countries having local or native
languages other than English or a form of English, but it does not in any way
mean that it has become dreadfully important for us to use English as a medium of
communication even normally. We have forgotten the fact that in our countries
the number of people who can speak English or even understand it for that
matter is very less, this leading to the sheer impression of show-off to those
people who belong to the clan of people who can not speak that good of English.
Keeping in touch with our own culture and own native
languages would, if not impress the so called educated class, at least raise us
in terms of our own culture because even if we try as hard as possible to run
away from who we are we can not and according to me, and I know a lot of other
people, these days English is not being used as a mode of communication for
office but rather for the sole purpose of showing to other people that we do
belong to the upper hierarchy!!
