TS Eliot in his "The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" referred to shallow men and painted a grim picture of a barren land where human beings are too mechanical to make a sense of life. This is to the extent that they connect nothing with nothing. Two most revolutionary, advanced and of course practical gadgets -- cell phone and computer --seem to have turned today's young generation into a crazy lot incapable of great emotion and introspection. All the hypes with facebook, twitter and the likes are mostly confined to vaporous matters with instant craze. Apart from soliciting responses to a few gross incidents --which unfortunately cross all limits of rationality --there is a propensity to focus on all things light.
Young people are unlearning their command of language --both mother tongue and any other language they are supposed to learn as an international language. Instead, a hybrid or cocktail type of language is now ruling the roost of social websites. Imponderous, freakish and even clownish, the admixture of languages may serve a purpose of often self promotion but the practice is doing immense harm to the urge of learning vocabulary and get the right term in the right moment. The result is for all to see: deeper feelings cannot be conveyed by this type of near-slang and bizarre language. Communication may have become easier but at a high cost. A kind of innovation, this could be avoided in the interest of real language.
When language fails someone, the wretchedness is for all to see. The process of language development is long and arduous. It is a journey from the sign language to the most developed forms of different sets of vocabulary that have crossed several stages before assuming today's forms. A number of highly developed and sophisticated languages like Sanskrit have lost their relevance because these were confined to elite class of society and the lower classes were barred from learning it. Now here is a process in the reverse order. No one is barred from using the cantankerous vocabulary but the very practice of bad mother tongue in foreign alphabets exposes not only the barrenness of thought process but also the lack of initiative on the part of the users to learn a language well.
Its impact is likely to be terrible in the long run. When the practice of writing love letters or any other letters is no longer felt, there is hardly any urgency to communicate the deepest emotion one feels for another. It is more than mere communication. It is communion at its core with a soul mate. Just imagine the development Baisnab Padabali in the middle age when Radha the eternal jilted beloved pined for her smarter lover Krishna or Kanu through the ageless poems composed by Jaidev, Boru Chandidas and others. Literature evolves only when the deepest of feelings or realities at their most succinct get their expression. Apart from the epics and dramas in ancient Greece and India, few ever could showcase the flourishing language and literature in such height.
If trivialising feelings and emotions is the purpose, the newly developed language surely is an appropriate vehicle. But it is purely nonsense when imagination and depth of thought are concerned. Treating all things lightly is a tendency quite apparent and it is likely to produce a generation of no substance so far as language and communication at a deeper level is concerned. People must have big hearts but here is an attempt to make things shallow and insubstantial.
Dangerous development on the language front
Nilratan Halder | Published: October 31, 2015 00:00:00 | Updated: November 30, 2024 06:01:00
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