Key and Barrier

On a Thursday morning in April 2013, one of the conference rooms of Park Plaza hotel of West Delhi was teeming with young Indians, nervously shifting around on their seats, palms sweaty and fingertips rubbing against each other. With ever vigilant eyes, they were being monitored by the staff of the British Council for any attempts for cheating: The oral part of the IELTS (International English Language Testing System) exam was about to start. The aspiring students and young professionals were one by one called in front of the room first for what resembled a mugshot, after which they were asked to return to their seat. A regular flow of examiners with their staff member badges confidently swinging came in to the room taking examinees to the corridor of the floor the Council had reserved itself for the day. They were placed to wait outside one of the rooms and during those passing minutes everything they had learned at school would soon be put to the ultimate test - years of work would be either rendered completely redundant or a seal of success would be stamped. Failure to speak English fluently could make scholastic achievement in any other field useless, and thus an aspiring young talented scientist could remain forever obscure, if he was to fail to enunciate properly.

The differences in the examinees reactions gave away their educational background. The English-medium educated kid would keep shifting position on his chair out of sheer "let's just get this over with" boredom, whereas the Hindi-medium kid might be paralyzed in terror waiting for his linguistic dismemberment to begin. The only distraction to their stress would be the sight of my white face among the hundreds of Indian faces. I was in the process of applying for a Master's programme abroad and coming from a non-English speaking country, the IELTS-certificate was needed. Hence, I had merrily joined thousands of aspiring young Indians waiting to prove their worth. Every young person's prospect for a successful career in India would start here - mastery of the English language.

Even while registering for the exam a few weeks earlier, the whole building of the British Council in Delhi had  had an ominous and intimidating presence. After submitting the application, the great initiation would loom in the near future. Soon, you would be put to the ultimate test of "hero or zero" and it all would boil down to correct conjugation of irregular verbs, mastery of idioms and phrasal verbs, correct pronunciation of word-initial consonant clusters and accurate placement of schwa. Failure to twist your tongue the right way would catapult you immediately back several decades to the village and eternal mediocrity - the ultimate nightmare of a young aspiring Indian. The glitzy malls and shiny office complexes of the big cities of their dreams would then manifest only as deadening dens of underachievement, as the fate of working as a waiter or a security guard would become the painful reminder of what was promised to them, but then taken away right in front of their noses. All because they had told the examiner they had "pijja" for "läänch" and they like girls with "ishtrait häär" and "fäär compläxion".

To unlearn all this had been pounded repeatedly into their heads at the many dubious coaching institutes with the words "British", "Oxford" or "Cambridge" in it. Would it all be worth it? At least the official sounding name of the institute had evoked images of authority and the course had given the necessary confidence boost.

A week later it would be time for the written exam. It was still a good while before the exam would start, but already hundreds of young people were shuffling around the premises nervously. While queuing to the exam venue, a girl in front of me would keep reciting English words as if in prayer while a couple of young Sikh boys were keeping up a very artificial conversation just to keep the language flowing, carefully watching out for the pitfall of breaking into Hindi/Punjabi mid-sentence, which would otherwise have been their daily way of communcating. Everywhere I pointed my ears in a largely Hinglish-speaking crowd, only English was spoken with zero Hindi-adulteration, almost as some kind of a linguistic policing measure.

Eventually approximately 500 Indians and one bewildered Finn were directed to the examination hall to their designated seats. A huge timer was dominating the space, making everyone painfully aware how limited their time to complete the exam would be. Soon enough, the hurried rustle of some 500 pencils racing through the multiple choice answer sheets filled the air. Under considerable stress, even the simplest task may become confusing. As an English major, I found myself instantly humbled as I realized that I actually had to concentrate on the exercises to write the answers in correct form in the correct answer sheet. There was no room for error as time was ticking away.

Not all were able to focus. The entire hall lifted their heads for a passing second, as a young man was suddenly firmly escorted out of the hall. He had not stopped writing when time was up. The very animated youngster was waving his hands in the air in panic and frustration and begged for a second chance demanding justice, but the examiners had none of it. Failure to follow instructions in the slightest resulted in immediate disqualification. The young man had just wasted 9000 rupees (120 euros) for a moment's absent-mindedness and taken several steps back in his career development.

The other night I was at home with an electrician who had come to fix a constantly overheating plug. The man was deeply concentrated on his work and impressively crafty in his trade. Communcation between us was done with a mix of English and Hindi, both filling the gaps with either of the languages - the sort of linguistic flexibility which is very commonplace in India and which is very innovative and inspiring. The man did his job brilliantly, but after packing his kit and shaking my hand, he felt appropriate to apologise for his "bad English". I had just marvelled at the electrician who had done his job so efficiently and quickly, and here was the same man pleading for fogiveness from me. Needless to say, I felt awkward and stunned, but also remembered, that I had experienced the same with many autorickshaw drivers. After the "hello" and "how are you" they would switch back to Hindi and sometimes apologise for not speaking English, but might quickly and proudly add that their children were studying in an English-medium school, so that they would not end up like their father. I shrugged at the electricians apology with a mildly outraged "no problem at all", to which he went on to mention that he had excelled in social studies and maths and if it wasn't for his poor command of English, he would not be doing this job.

“The arithmetic and algebra he could manage, and Hindi he was good at. But English, and every other subject — all of them taught in English — fried his brains. He was not alone in this. The entire school was full of boys whose brains were being detonated by Shakespeare and Dickens and Wordsworth and Tennyson and memoriam and daffodils and tiger tiger burning bright and solitary reapers and artful dodgers and thous and forsooths and the rhymes of ancient mariners. The first counter-attack Kabir M made on English was in Class IV when he learnt like the rest of his reeling mates to say, ‘Howdudo? Howdudo?’ The answer being: ‘Juslikeaduddoo! Juslikeaduddoo!’ It set the pattern for life for most of them. English was to be ambushed ruthlessly when and where the opportunity arose. Its soldiers were to be mangled, shot, amputated wherever they were spotted. Its emissaries to be captured and tortured. The enemy of English came at them from every direction: in the guise of forms to be filled, exams to be taken, interviews to be given, marriage proposals to be evaluated. The enemy English had a dwarfing weapon: it made instant lilliputs of them.”

- Tarun Tejpal - The Story of My Assassins

(For more on this topic, read here http://tehelka.com/the-english-median/)

Nepal

As my first venture out of India to explore another South Asian country, Nepal seemed an easy choice. Hence, me and Meg packed our backpacks and headed to Pokhara to chill by the beautiful Phewa lake, to stalk on wildlife in Chitwan national park and check out the hustle and bustle of Kathmandu. Here's the trip in pictures.

Boaters on the Phewa lake in Pokhara.

The Phewa lake

A kid upto some shenanigans.

One night in Pokhara we stumbled upon a group of British gurkha troops who had come to Pokhara for a meeting. Any further details they refused to disclose, but turned out to be a right laugh. The evening turned into an all nighter. The British-run elite military unit known as the Gurkhas are one of Nepal's best known exports and it's still many a young Nepali man's dream to become part of this reputable force.

Sunset at the Phewa lake.

A vehicle straight out of Mad Max.

Nepali Thali - according to my Bengali companion, very closely resemblant of Bengali food in flavour and level of spice.  Nepal generally seemed to have fairly close links to Bengal in terms of cultural influences.

Laundry.

Taking a ride on one of the local minibuses, the man in the front is the cashier whose job is also to announce the stop and the destination in the same speed and volume of auctioneers. 

Still 50 years to go before the grand opening!

The landscapes between Kathmandu and Pokhara reminded me slightly of Assam with their green hills and abundant rice fields. 

Most of the time in Pokhara the Annapurna mountain range  was obscured by either clouds or the afternoon haze of smog. Typically, the day we were leaving the weather was clear enough to enjoy the range in its full glory.

A lady harvesting rice, near the Kathmandu - Pokhara highway.

The Boudhanath stupa is one of the most important pilgrimage sites of Tibetan buddhism. The dome itself is claimed to contain some remains of the Buddha but nobody knows for sure as it has been sealed for aeons.

Bindis on sale at Pashupatinath, the most important pilgrimage site of Hinduism in Nepal.

Pre-assembled sets of offerings on sale - spirituality made convenient.

Kumkum stall at Pashupatinath, surrounded by the usual Hindu gods and a new unrecognized one(?)

Outraged by the rip-off prices at the roadside eatery our busdriver chose, we walked further down the road and found this young man running a fine establishment with his mother. He served us an exotic local delicacy called Maggi. 

Elephant rider takes five before loading another group of tourists...

...such as these.

The Chitwan national park is one of the most famous national parks in Asia and one of the best sites to spot the endangered one-horned rhino. This guy seemed unfazed by being surrounded by elephants loaded with Korean tourists incessantly documenting its movements with an iPad.

Sun sets over Chitwan while local boys try to catch some fish.

As our budget was getting tighter towards the end of the trip , we had to locate the cheapest dinner in town. At the very end of the Chitwan downtown main strip, this guy gladly made us some delicious momos from scratch. 

The bundle of chilis, garlic and lime can usually be found at the doorways of South Asian houses  to ward off evil spirits.

This door on one of the narrow streets of old Kathmandu will not only ward of evil spirits but probably most other guests as well.

Rickshawallahs seem to be the same everywhere you go. You stand on one corner and they holler at you every five minutes, just in case you change your mind. "Rickshaw?" "No thanks"..."how about now?"..."Now? No?"..."What about now?"

A kid waiting for his Jhalmuri. 

Authentic Experiences

My neighbourhood has a significant population of western people. There are a lot of big cars with blue "CD" and "UN" plates parked in front of the swankiest looking houses in the area. Whenever I go to my market for daily groceries, I'm bound to see at least one white face over there, either walking around with a determined swagger of perfect ethnic adaptation or looking lost and awkward like a kid separated from his parents in an amusement park.

Every now and then I bump into them in one of the stores on the main strip. It usually ends up being a very awkward encounter. It happens more often than not around here when two white people meet in a setting other than an expat party. They eye each other askance and try to ignore the other gora in the room as if they were the only white person in Delhi. The other white person scans the shelves and tries to chat the errand boys in broken Hindi, because he's the one who's blending in, whoever this other white impostor is, must be a spoiled "UN" or "Embassy" type who had to come down to the cornershop only because the organic home delivery was not available today. The other one is the one must be the one who's living the "authentic Indian" lifestyle. Meanwhile, the Indian shopkeeper watches the show with puzzlement. He might sincerely expect a friendly exchange between the westerners of "where are you from" and "what are you doing in India", but no, they quickly pick up their groceries, pay, and leave the shop in hurried manner, leaving the small change on the counter.

There is strange psychology about this behaviour, which seems to be a mix of a subtly colonial attitude mixed with romanticed expectations of the "ethnic" and "authentic" experieces that they are going to have with the "locals" in the foreign country. Then they can go back and their ordeal in harsh conditions can be added to their CV of "unique experiences" that the person has had. The satirical "Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like" - blog quite fantastically summarizes this phenomenon (the comments are worth reading too). The anecdote is set in Central America, but could might as well be in India. A white person bumps into another in a small local café:

So it’s no wonder that she’ll look away or stare straight through that American dude that shows up at the little market at the same time. ”Oh, your husband?” the corn lady might say. “No no,” the EAW will struggle to explain aloud, “I don’t know him. I’ve never seen him. I don’t know what he might be doing here….” We have nothing to do with one another, nothing at all in common…she will continue in her head… I’m a long-timer. I’ve got field cred. He’s probably a short-term volunteer or a tourist or a consultant, here for a short trip. He probably knows none of your customs. I bet you don’t wave at him when he goes by. He’s likely one of those typical Expat Aid Workers types, tromping around, clueless, feeling uncomfortable and superior to the locals. I’d bet he doesn’t even speak the language or really know any local people except for his driver. I’m the one who’s locally integrated. I’m the one who belongs here, not him!

Humph. These other foreigners, trespassing on the EAW’s own individual and patented experience of adventure and local living. Who do they think they are? Why do the locals assume all white people know each other, or might want to greet one another with smiles and handshakes, treat each other to a portion of roasted corn and explain where they are from and what they are doing there at the roadside market? Really. These locals don’t understand EAWs at all.

Some of this hard-wired antisocial behaviour might be explained by the fact that the aid-worker/UN/NGO racket is a very competitive game of whoever speaks the most languages, feels more comfortable in various settings and has established their field cred by living in "harsh" conditions, i.e. the way local people in that country normally live in.


I was in an afterparty invited by my friends who I had met in the bar the same night and everybody was enjoying themselves with some drinks on a rooftop on a hot Delhi night. The bubbling discussion diverted into work and somebody casually asked me what I was doing. When I told them that I work in the embassy it was as if the you could've heard the sound of the needle skipping on a record, they looked at me with mixed faces of contempt and ridicule, "oh so you're one of those people, Embassy heads, huh?". They never bothered to explain what they meant by this, but instead continued on lecturing how this little NGO where they were doing a 3-month unpaid internship, was the most important humanitarian endeavour in the history of development work. A spoiled "Embassy head" would never understand such things, though.


Another explanation why western people can be very awkward with their kind abroad has to do with the whole industry of "authentic experiences", a form of tourism really, which is a result of a kind of a post-consumerist culture, where many young western find themselves in these days. Buying things from a store has lost its novelty value and is more like a necessity, even going to a package holiday with the family is comparable to eating at McDonald's, it's almost embarrassing in it's mundanity - therefore one must do something that nobody else has done, something unique, like going to the most obscure place they can find in the map, hell-bent on understanding the local culture, living with the people, to have a true ethnic experience! So they quit their job and take a gap year:

But much to their consternation, after smoking hash with the sadhus while riding a rabid camel in Rajasthan and hangliding with the buddhist monks in Bhutan while doing cocaine or getting accidentally married to the village chief's daughter in Laos drunk on the local spirits or whatever other compromising situation they get themselves in, they realize that no matter how hard they've tried, someone else has been there already, or worse yet, is ruining their authentic ethnic experience by being there right now. There's a loud group of Israelis on post-military service holiday, a German couple of rat-race dropouts in their early forties and a bunch of 21-year old French girls who just finished their NGO-internship and are now backpacking before going home and they are all waiting for their turn for the unique ethnic experience.

Constant Rave

It's ubiquitous; the steady thump of the 4/4 bassdrum the autotuned vocalization of a current or a recycled hit song and the following frantic synthesizer loop penetrate the soundscape everywhere. Delhi's public space seems to have fallen victim by a militant spoon-feeding marketing campaign conspiracy of house music producers, where no public space is left without a sound system blasting top 40 house remixes, making your daily activities into a constant rave party, whether you want it or not. Every single public space is filled with loud, abrasive, commercial electronic music.

The other day I went to a mall to catch a new Hindi-film. As I was being frisked by the jaded security guard at the door, one couldn't help feeling as if I was on the queue to a night club. Passing throught the marbled hallways of retail, I had to traipse through the food court, where obese punjabi kids were franticly stuffing their faces with various forms of deep fried matter to the beat of the inhouse DJ. Elbows sharpened I ventured on to the movie hall, hoping to enter a different aural space, only to realize that the soundsystem of the mall seemed to be connected to every single room in the complex, making the party inescapable. Come intermission (it is common in Indian movie halls to have a mid-film break), Mr DJ was immediately back at the decks. Feeling slightly nauseous, I had to seek comfort in the soothing atmosphere of the washroom, only to find myself in boogie wonderland. The volume of the music did not drop a single bar.

A lone toilet attendant, a small man in his late 50s maybe, was standing at the corner waiting to hand out paper tissues to people. The look on his face was resemblant of a thousand yard stare, "a limp, unfocused gaze of a battle-weary soldier" who has either seen too many piles of dead bodies or been subjected to severe torture. The man's aura was oozing with nihilistic detachment, barely concealed with a token smile.
He had been exposed to this rave party too long to care anymore.

It gets worse in bars. South Delhi sees new bars emerging these days quicker than ever, yet the concept seems to always remain the same. Every bar has to be a "lounge bar" where the amount of staff is usually manifold compared to the clientele, but one still has to make a real effort to get any service. An army of jaded staff is leaning against the counter while the house music party keeps blaring in the back. Any kind of attempt of conversation with your company is systematically terminated by the sheer volume of the music and the spontanious flow of conversation is often reduced to loud bursts of monosyllabic sentences which deliver the maximum amount of information. This needs to be done, because the music is so loud that every sentence must be carefully thought through to avoid wastage of vocal chords.

After two and a half years in Delhi, I have still yet to find a watering hole where one can have a quiet drink alone or a relaxed conversation with a friend or a partner after work over a beer. This seems to be too much to ask in the city of constant rave. Quiet pubs and bars where most of the noise is created by the bubbling conversations of customers is an integral part of the social fabric of western culture. The cliched euphenism "extension of living room" summarizes the way bars and pubs are seen in many western countries. They are welcome to people in suits, coctail dresses, working overalls as well as sweatpants and crocs. They are places where you can have a raging party or where you can sit quietly and wallow in your sorrow. Coming from Finland, where being sad and quiet is your general state of being, it is especially of vital importance to have spaces where one can sit in silence and stare at the bottom of your pint, comfortably basking in your wistful melancholia.

Having tried to market the concept of opening a cozy no-frills pub with only quiet music or no background music somewhere in south Delhi has only resulted in somewhat tepid interest and shrugs among Delhiites. One explanation that has been offered to me is that indians generally are uncomfortable with silence, hence in case of premature death of conversation in company, the silent spaces can be quickly filled by Mr.DJ. Also, the concept of going to a bar for a casual drink whenever generally seems to be still a bit of an alien concept, rather it is always more of a remarkable social event for which one needs to dress up and make an extra effort, perhaps the loud techno and house music is seen as a part of the desired atmosphere. Be it as it may, there is certainly a market in Delhi for a cosy corner with an extensive bar menu, comfy chairs and no music but the ripples of conversations in the background.

Snapshots pt.4

Pigeons at Humayun's tomb.

One man's livelihood.

A barber takes five, while son is keeping an eye on the shop.

Indian IKEA

Fresh tandoori rotis at the Nizamuddin village.

A man takes a nap with his goats as the wife supervises.

"So this is where your chicken tikka comes from, my friend."

Graffiti on the way to my house. These buildings were marauded soon after. The plot is waiting for new construction to emerge, as is typical in Delhi, where land is much sought after.

A goat herder was tending his flock near Tughlaqabad fort, the big goat was called Basanti.

The cornershop in my area sells anything from sim card recharge to fresh samosas.

The other night on our way to a party Meg parked her car in front of a house next to the venue, the owner of the house punctured all tires as soon as we turned our backs. We tried driving, but soon had to leave the car to a random spot and take an auto back home. The next morning we realized we had parked right in front of a tire shop. 

Vernacular

As I have to take the rickshaw every morning to go to work, I have slowly, mostly by immersion, begun to become conversant in a daily variety of Hindi, which, in fact is no single language, but a bundle of Hindi, English, Urdu, Punjabi and the language of whatever state you are from all combined into a sort of common linguistic masala. Every time I encounter a word I need to use but don't know I immediately look up the Hindi equivalent, usually with the result of being told by my Indian companion that nobody would understand me if I actually used that word on the street.

The other day I wanted to calm down a short-tempered rickshaw driver but did not know the word for "impatient", the dictionary offered the word adhīra, which I figured sounded simple enough. My attempt at using the word only resulted in a blank stare by my driver. Before using Hindi words, I usually test them on Meg just to be sure they are words that people actually use daily, this proved to be another word that nobody uses, unless you're trying to be Premchand or Tagore. It might have been a better idea to just use "impatient" in between a Hindi sentence.

A similar anecdote was told by a journalist who had returned to Delhi after many years and spoke Hindi the way it was taught to him at school. While trying to buy a box of matches with his cigarettes, he casually tried to address the cigarette vendor with an appropriately courteous manner: Mujhe ek diyasalai dijiye. 
After nothing but blank stares, he finally blurted "ek matches do yaar!" with instant desired results.

There is a linguistic polar shift taking place in India where English is forced to make way for Hindi in new domains. One manifestation of it is the language used in media. In the December 2012 issue of Caravan Magazine, Krishn Kaushik in his long reportage paints a picture of the current state of the Indian English-language news media. The general observation of the article is that TV-news in English is in fact a losing game and a marginal segment amongst a largely Hindi- and local language dominated viewing public:


According to TAM (Television Audience Measurement), the healthiest segments of Indian television are Hindi and regional general entertainment, which each capture at least 35 percent of overall television viewership.

...contrary to popular perception, English-language news is a fringe genre of Indian broadcasting. TAM’s data indicate that, for the first six months of this year, English-language news was watched by only 0.21 percent of the television audience in TAM markets. That amounts to one viewer for every 500 television-watching people, watching English-language news for less than five minutes per day.

Television news in Hindi or Hinglish and regional languages reached a public that ranges from the street sweeper and rickshaw driver all the way to company CEO's and the members of parliament. English, on the other hand, only reaches the educated few. It is often said that the vast majority of the Indian public are in fact not big readers and therefore TV will reach a much wider audience than any book. Vast majority of the people who watch TV on a daily basis are most comfortable with Hindi or Hinglish. Meanwhile, English remains a stalwart of the printed word, in books as well as in newspapers.

There is no intimacy attributed to English as a language, it remains a language of instruction in elite schools and the lingo of white collar jobs. It is mostly seen as a tool of a sort - an emblem of professional aspiration. Rural and small-town India craves to learn English to get ahead in life, but seems to only value it due to its material benefits and certain lexical borrowings. For some, it has become a stepping stone away from caste-bound roots: BBC Radio 4 reported on a group of former untouchables, who had started worshiping the English language as their liberator from caste-based socio-economic boundaries. It had even inspired them to create new gods into Indian mythology: Their saviour from caste oppression is personified as a goddess, modelled on the Statue of Liberty, in a sari and mounted on a computer.

Meanwhile, Hindi, in various colloquial forms, remains a language of the common man that everybody speaks and understands, but nobody really studies. Learning Hindi at school stops at 8th grade for most people and anything more complex than that will be patched up with English vocabulary. For many, it remains a "kitchen" language, but also a de facto language used most in everyday communication. Beyond a certain point, Hindi as a language becomes too complex for most Indians and too cut off from today with it's sanskritized artificial vocabulary. The national language of India thus seems to be a sort of a bundle of different languages in a basic Hindi frame, not least with the aid of Bollywood and advertising and made nation-wide after the arrival of satellite television.

There is a young generation in Delhi, as well as other big cities in India, that seems to exist in a sort of a linguistic limbo, where a colloquial variety of Hindi heavily laden with English vocabulary as well as expressions of the speaker's local language has become the mother tongue. Meanwhile 100% "pure" forms of either have remained in very confined domains and generally deemed as pretentious, artificial or just too difficult. Many young people reminisce on their Hindi classes at school with horror.

Hindi as a literary language is commonly deemed to be a 20th century political construct and the mother tongue of none. As coexistance of various languages had been the norm for most Indians and Pakistanis, linguistic purism and zealous efforts to eradicate any foreign influences from language on both sides after the partition resulted in a comical situation where nobody actually understood their own national language. Robert D.King in his book on Nehru's language politics illustrates this situation with an anecdote:

Hindi-speaking Indians frequently say that they cannot understand the Urdu of Radio Pakistan, Urdu-speaking Pakistanis say the same of the Hindi heard on All-India Radio. Nehru himself complained that he could not understand the increasingly Sanskritized Hindi language promulgated by All-India Radio. He frequently commented on this in his letters, and on at least one occasion he rose in the Lok Sabha to complain that he could not understand Hindi broadcasts of his own speeches.

Decades later, the situation remains more or less the same. Rashmi Sadana in her article "Managing Hindi", visits the Deparment of Official Language in Delhi and encounters a government office that time seems to have forgotten. Although Hindi in many states is the de facto language of administration, which since Nehru has been according to national language policy, the national capital region encounters a different reality:

In the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Haryana, the state governments used Hindi “about 100 percent of the time”, and the version they spoke was a “chaste” Hindi, a Hindi laden with Sanskrit vocabulary. But in Delhi this vocabulary became “burdensome”. “When it comes to the capital, Hindi has a very subordinate role to play. The language in the offices and ministries is English.” No one speaks of “difficult” English, but people speak of “difficult” Hindi. “While there is an impetus to learn English, a craze in semi-urban and rural areas, there is a sense that you don’t need Hindi to do well in life.

Another BBC article argues that Hinglish is a pure construct of Indian linguistic innovation, which has become the everyday lingo of a new younger elite as well. The problem, according to the writer, is that for many it has become the mother tongue which lacks variation in different social settings:

The trouble with dysfunctional Hinglish is that it can cause havoc when clear and precise communication is required, whether on a simple taxi ride or in more serious situations like hospitals and law-courts. Young Indians still need better quality, standardised English teaching if they want to access the global knowledge economy and stay ahead of eager new English-speakers in China or Argentina.

For many Indians, especially middle-class, being multilingual is a norm and there is very little differentiation between languages in spoken interaction. As most Indians speak at least two to three languages, jumping between languages is but normal and you might hear a person using for example English, Hindi an Bengali in a single sentence, without it sounding awkward or strange at all. Rather, saying a complete sentence in a single language seems to be actually more rare.

Linguistic purism has its political implications as well. By speaking a Sanskrit-heavy form of "proper" Hindi, one risks of being labelled as a zealot Hindu nationalist and speaking only in English sans Hindi might be seen as snobbery and would only make you able to communicate with a limited stratum of society.

Therefore, the linguistic scene of middle class India seems to be that sticking to one language only is almost as if to make a statement of a kind. As Mrinal Pande in her book "The Other Country: Dispatches from the Mofussil" aptly summarises:

Actually, India's fabled middle class cuts through the rural and urban divides and converses in multiple Indian languages increasingly laced with English words.

A Hinglish McDonald's flyer: The ad roughly reads: "Our treat, arrived at McDonald's for you to enjoy."

Jadu Tona - Black Magic

Last week, as the festivities were at full swing on Diwali night and Nizamuddin East colony had for one night turned into a full war zone, as it is customary this time of the year. The seemingly incessant ratatat made sure no-one was sleeping in the colony and made the local street dogs run around for cover in panic, ears tightly against their heads.

Eventually the youngsters had shot their pocket money to the sky in bright colors and peace was restored. The colony was falling asleep again. As I peeked outside to inspect the mess of shredded paper and gunpowder, something else had appeared  in front of my house. In the crossroads next to the house, someone had poured what appeared to be mustard oil in a circular shape and had carefully placed a packet of Kurkure chips, a diya-light and a packet of biscuits.

My immediate secular western rationalist brain figured that someone had littered outside my house, but I was quickly corrected by my girlfriend Meg that there are dark forces at play here and one should tread carefully, this was a display of jadu tona, i.e. black magic, a spell to wish ill or curse someone else either out of envy or anger. The spell is apparently to be placed in a spot where four roads cross and whoever unfortunate soul happens to walk or drive over it, will be infected with a horrible curse with a long list of various ill effects.
You might be driving across an intersection completely unaware and the next thing you know, your boss texts you that you're fired, your wife has a miscarriage and you drive off a bridge.

Intrigued as I was, I fetched my camera to go and document this display of sorcery. Photographing was still acceptable but walking across the spell could have had catastrophic effects to my life in the future. Needless to say, it was better to be safe than sorry.

The spell is supposed to be placed in a spot where 4 roads meet.

The circle of mustard oil has a crushed diya-light, a packet of Kurkure crisps and a packet of biscuits placed inside it.

The next day at work I was recounting my fascinating discovery to my Indian colleague. Having heard my description of the spell, her face immediately turned several shades paler and she froze and almost dropped the folder she was carrying: "You...didn't step over it, did you?"

Another colleague recalled that her husband had been cursed by someone, as a result of which he was in a total of 17 bike accidents in a span of roughly two years, always a close call. After a while, his mother turned to a holy man, who managed to sort it out. It's been a safe ride ever since. Similar experiences seem to be very common to most Indians and very few seem to have even the slightest hue of sarcasm in their tone when describing their supernatural experiences with practitioners of magic. Dealing with forces of the spirit world here is no laughing matter or something to make fun of. Belief in the existence of some kind of a supernatural realm is quite common in the world view of Indians and there is no need to risk it, so might as well play it safe and not conjure any evil spirits.

Of course, for a reasonable fee, an experienced spiritual consultant, such as Baba Nur-e-Ilahi can remove all spells cast on you in no time. Also, Baba Sidh Guru Ji is your man in case of any spiritual trouble: