Two Kannadigas = Father-son political party
Three Kannadigas = Campus placements at Infy, scheduled to go to the US soon.
Four Kannadigas = Entire Kannada-speaking population of Koramangala and Indiranagar.
Tamil Nadu, the one place where every individual lands up building a vocabulary of at least a hundred words in Tamil ranging from the slang “po da” to the greeting more popular than good morning… “Saaptiaa?” Which means “had something to eat?” This is one place where the locals really love their language, culture and heritage and the thought of trying to learn a different language is the last thing on their mind.
I have a few friends who have been to Chennai and when I ask them how was their experience this is what they say: “These people don’t budge from speaking Tamil!”
On a wider angle, Delhiites don’t budge from Hindi: “Kyun, theek bola na?”, Bengalis from “tumi kemon achho?”, Keralites from “Yendada mone?” and Biharies from “Kaisan ho bituwa?”. Then there are Mumbaikars with a mixture of Hindi and Marathi, Hydrabadies with a mix of Urdu/Hindi and Telugu.
Any one who visits these places are bound to come back with a considerable vocabulary of the local language. The local language comes along with people like silver foil stuck on sweets (Sorry.. can’t help it… I just love food).
All this brings me to think about my land, and more specifically, my city, the garden city “Bangalore”. Every outside person who comes here does not face any language problem. They needn’t sweat it out to learn kannada or attend some rapid kannada speaking course. Given a span of three months a non kannadiga would learn a max of 30 words which include words like “Bartira?” (Will you come?), “Hogtira?” (Will you go?), “Yeshtu?” (How much?). All these words learnt widely because they can take you places, literally, if you want to use an auto to commute then you got to know these words and that’s where the need to know to speak kannada ends. The rest of the city just welcomes you with the language you know be it Hindi or Tamil.
Though I am born and brought up in Mysore, Bangalore is as special as Mysore is to me. I've seen this place change and more importantly I’ve seen the use of kannada fade away with time. This place has gotten more cosmopolitan with locals speaking in tongues of outsiders. It has reached such an extent that kannadigas themselves don’t know kannada properly.
Why is it so? Is it because people think it is not cool to speak in kannada? Or is it simply great hospitality of us kannadigas to make our guests feel really comfortable by speaking their tongue? I think it has got to do with a bit of both. If it were not for the dislike of the language the Kannada film industry would not try imposing all kind of bans on movies of other languages or Kannada activists would not go around spraying black paint on English boards. This dislike for the language gives us more scope to learn other languages and what we pick up is greatly influenced by our surrounding, like the way I picked up some Konkani from my neighbors. No offense to the North Indians but they have greatly poisoned us with Hindi. Almost every person who has a North Indian as a friend takes great pain to learn to speak Hindi than let the other person learn kannada. The other part, hospitality of us kannadigas… well we are world famous in India for this :), which means that we love to make our guests feel at home. And what best a way than to let them use their language and we sacrifice ours.
It sounds good that we are cosmopolitan and all that stuff but if you look closely you will see that all the metros, the places that have been important trade centers in India for decades now have not lost their language, culture and heritage. Delhi: people still speak Hindi all the time. Calcutta: Bengali reigns. Mumbai: Marathi never dies out and Chennai: come rain, come snow, come Tsunami… Tamil will always survive. Then why is it that Bangalore is in a hurry, a rat race to let away its culture and heritage? Is it good? India is known as “the land of many languages and cultures and rich in heritage”. But at the rate at which Bangalore is going India will have the original "many- 1" languages, the culture and heritage might just last a little longer.
As a helpless and lazy individual all I can do is pray that we do not let things fade away as rapidly and work towards growing our roots deeper and keep our language and culture strong. Let us not let people put so much silver foil on us that our actual color and flavor is lost. And more importantly let us learn to be proud of being Kanadigas.
(By kannadigas I mean we the people of Karnataka and not just the Kannada speaking masses)
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