Rail Diaries#3 - WL...RAC...And CNF !!!: Blog # 41

Rail Diaries#3 - WL...RAC... & CNF!!!

                  Anyone who has travelled by train would have gone through this painstaking process of their ticket going through the stages of Waiting list, Reservation against cancellation and Confirmation. I did too, last Sunday.

               IRCTC shamelessly ditched, as always. With great difficulty, I got a tatkal ticket (thanx to Vivek’s chalakudy clout ;) ). And here I was, on board Aleppey express on 15^th July 2012 yet again.

          

     In our compartment, there was this person who got transferred from Delhi to Chennai. He said he is working in AAI and is going to work for a while in Chennai Airport. He said “Here, no one understands what I say. Neither can I make out what they are saying. There should be only one language in the country”.

          Being the language zealot that I am, I would never agree to that. The beauty of languages is in their diversity and little similarities. For instance, Bengali is one of the sweetest languages. It is similar to Malayalam in the sense that it doesn’t consider gender as much as in Hindi. Hence for mallus and bongs, “Gaadi aaya and Gaadi aayi” are one and the same J .

             I like the melodious ring of tamil as much as I like the buoyant spirit of Gujarati. And who doesn’t love the most vivacious of all languages, Urdu? Hindi gives a head start and acts as a talking point in itself with almost anyone from any part of our country.

           I think languages in themselves are a paradox. In spite of all their differences, these languages hold this great nation of ours together. People teach and learn each others’ languages and a camaraderie evolves from that.

The similarity in languages acts as a binding thread and the differences facilitates a melting pot of varied cultures.

          But having said that, I read somewhere that there are two nations of the world which are divided by a single language – US and UK by English!. Strange!

                                                                                                                            

                                                                                                                                            Arun Babu.

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