Wednesday, 13 November 2013

The Laments of a Linguist

I believe that blogs should be a true representation of life and I want this blog to truly represent every aspect of my life in India, for friends and family but also for potential travellers or dancers thinking of doing what I'm doing. So here are a few things I've picked about India and also about languages.

Just after I got to India, an Indian friend of mine told me that Indians were some of the nicest, friendliest people on earth but that they might be shy. I have to say I didn't at all believe him. Alas I've now seen it is indeed true. When I walk the streets of Ballygunge, South Kolkata, everyone stares at me. I am a white face in Pakistani clothes in a part of Kolkata not generally seen as touristy, so stares are to be expected. The thing is that it can be incredibly intimidating, the trick however is to smile because once you smile, you'll get such smile back that it just warms your heart. Someone once said that the thing about India is that there is life everywhere and this is so true. In every aspect of day-to-day life people here find time to smile and to laugh, they find time to get angry and to cry, they find to discuss the latest develops in Obama's career and the recession in England. There is never not enough time, never any time when things just stop. The thing I find most beautiful are the little shrines tucked into every little corner of the city, everyone here at some point finds time to pray, even just for a second. Life here is a gift and that is something you see all around you here.

Something that is often hard for westerners to adjust to is that nothing ever stand still here and nothing is monotonous. The streets of Ballygunge in the evenings are quite simply an attack on the senses. There are so many smells that you couldn't physically identify them all, there is colour on every corner and the amount of people that manage to squeeze into one path never ceases to amaze me. I think that in England we like our peace and quiet every now and then, we like a little moment in our day to just think and breathe and reflect but here every moment is a reflection, there is endless time and yet no time. It's very hard to adjust to constant moving, it's like living in a Christmas tree, one with those lights that flicker non-stop.

I will slowly add a lot more to this list as I find out more about this city. Now let's talk language. The one thing that I can now see many linguists in the UK have very wrong is that Hindi is the language to learn if you want to go to India. Hindi quite simply is not enough. I am in Kolkata, the capital city of West Bengal. The language of life here is Bangla, people here might speak Hindi, but most of them in my experience are more comfortable speaking in English. Bangla is the language of education, of publicity, of literature, of life. You can't survive here without Bangla. All shop signs are in Bangla, all posters are in Bangla, everything is in Bangla, Hindi is rare.

If there is one piece of advice I can give someone travelling to Kolkata for a long time it's to learn as much Bangla as possible beforehand. As a linguist when people around me are speaking Bangla, I make a conscious effort to listen to every word they say, to listen to the pronunciation, the intonation, the words. I am picking up a lot but I still don't understand most of what is being said and that creates a lot of problems. Not when people speak directly to me, then they tend to use Hindi or English. One problem is that people know I don't really speak Bangla and so they quite happily discuss me right in front of me, whilst looking at me. Now I know this is their mother tongue but then I would just simply prefer it if they discussed me when I'm not standing right there. The other thing that I find infuriating is that people tend to not bother letting me know what's going on half the time, they'll get ready to go out for example and then tell me about 5 minutes before they leave and I've got 5 minutes to decide what to do and then get ready for the outcome of that decision. If I spoke Bangla however I could perhaps latch on to what's happening from day to day because it is of course discussed in front of me. The quicker I pick up Bangla the better. 

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