English language can be dangerous

As my next-door neighbour at the office jostled into the office with a request the other day, I presumed it to be something else than what he asked for. It was to draft a covering letter for his company brochure. He said he has prepared one but doubted whether he wrote the correct language. I said I could improvise if I get that letter forwarded to my email. He meekly surrendered and said he wrote none. I insisted he should write one and forward me to correct since I had no time to think of writing a letter for him – And I was not in the letter writing business at all.

Word to word correction was imminent. But what surprised me was the last line, which read something like this. “So sir, please allow us one chance to perform on you”.

I wondered whether he was in Phuket or running a sex racket. I could not fathom what he wanted to say and called him. He said he just translated from a covering letter he received from some of his clients and it was in Gujarati. It read – “Amne sevano ek mauko aapo” or in Hindi ‘हमें सेवा का एक अवसर दे ” or in plain English “Please give us a chance to serve you”.

But I asked him where this ‘performance’ angle appeared in a letter where he had nothing to perform at all. In the meanwhile, my office boy entered carrying with him an answer for a question that I asked him in the morning about a new office being built on the ground floor. “It is a Sabarkanta sir,” he said. Huh !, What the hell is that??

I then realized he wanted to say ‘Cyber Café’ and went on to get deep into one of the districts of Gujarat. Now coming to Gujarat, its Chief Minister’s English is also in the same lines. I consider Mr Narendra Modi in high esteem on this count because he doesn’t try to speak the language he is not very well versed with. But in global seminars, he has no choice to but read out the prepared text in English since there are too many foreign dignitaries.

In one of the Global Investor’s Meet, he described Gujarat’s e-governance project as largest IP based e-governance project in ‘Asia Specific”. I waited for him to repeat it again since it was me who termed this achievement for the first time in an article in Dataquest long back during his predecessors time. So actually it should be Asia Pacific and not Asia Specific. But unfortunately that word was not repeated again and so cannot confirm what he said actually.

English – not being the mother tongue for Indians – has a history of goof ups in India. There is nothing wrong not to know English. We go through a phase of surviving with many languages that we learn when we are aged less than 6 years.

Compare it with an American or English kid. He only knows one language and that is English. Now if you ask an American child to write couple of sentences, he will look like Mr Beans in a beanbag.

Consider an Indian child. If the child happens to be in Gujarat, then he knows Gujarati, Hindi and English. Many also know Marathi if he happens to migrate to Mumbai and if the child is from another state settled here; he knows at least two more languages.

Now that is the richness of Indian kids. So not knowing English is no sin. But pretending to know it is certainly a problem. If you happen to do that, then some body will ‘perform’ on you that you can easily avoid for the time being.