BANGALORE- A CHANGED CITY

People in Bangalore are so busy and tensed that they forget about their health. They want to make money, invest and gain profit. I once overheard a lady say, “My husband has to leave early for office today. So even I had to leave for my walk early because I’ve to go back as soon as possible and prepare his lunch. He is obese and has high blood pressure. He isn’t allowed to have outside food. Oh god!”

Sometimes I wonder why it is such a necessity for a person to labour so hard for money to such an extent that he falls prey to dreadful diseases.

In some areas of Bangalore, we come across beautiful paintings on the wall with slogans like, ‘Keep your city clean!’ and ‘This is my city.’ It fills me with such pride, the fact that I stay in such a big and famous city like Bangalore. But then sights like an old woman sitting on the roadside, crying for food or money haunt me. I wonder…is this my city where there is no shelter for this woman? Is this really my city where we find people who long for even a simple meal a day? There are countless stomachs that sleep hungry at night in a city like Bangalore.

The citizens of Bangalore are well-educated people. When we come across a sensational piece of news, we get excited and we pass comments on it. But we never pause to question the reasons behind the emergence of such news. We wholeheartedly point fingers at the administrative setup of the country and forget that we’re the ones who vote for these people and it’s actually we who are to blame.

A majority of people are money-minded and only think about their well-being. It doesn’t matter to them what befalls their neighbours. Yet, when it’s time to pass judgments they very grandly say, ‘Oh this shouldn’t have happened. What a disgrace!” The famous saying by Leo Tolstoy, “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” is very true.

People come across petty problems everyday that all of us have experienced at some point or the other. I’ve come across some individuals who make a big fuss and create a scene for stupid little things to which their solution is verbal abuse. Sadly, I sometimes experience such nonsense early in the morning. It is a time when we treat ourselves to slokas and devotional songs. Instead we are forced to get an earful of such convoluted vocabulary. And it is coming out of the mouth of a literate person who is probably working in a big MNC. Why can’t such silly problems be solved by peaceful means? What is the necessity for such a big scene to be created?

We see bus drivers, traffic police and many government employees who themselves break the law. Fastening of the seat belts is made compulsory. We rarely ever see the police with belts locked into place. They check us for our driving licenses and we’re fined if we’re unable to display it. However, we rarely ever see a minister’s driver holding his license with him. Big banners of ‘Have you thanked a traffic police today for keeping your roads safe?’ make me laugh.

Can we put an end to all these flaws within us? Can we expect people to come up with a solution regarding the care, concern and maintenance of rules and regulations of public areas? Well, these questions can be answered with a firm ‘yes!’ But how firm will our resolution be? As human beings, how many resolutions have we sustained so far? I would say that the record consists of very few.

I’d like to end with a plea to you. Be concerned about other people and not just yourself. Respect your society, city and nation. No matter what happens, we must stay together, work together. As the saying goes, a single stick can be broken easily but a bundle of sticks cannot. It is our one duty to fulfill Dr. APJ’S vision of India 2020.


Neeraja B. Shringeri
II BA (HEE)

LANGUAGES IN DANGER

Although, many languages have come into existence and died away throughout human history, it was only in the 1990’s, following the publication of a series of worldwide surveys, that people began to notice that the rate of disappearance was significantly increasing. The thrust of these facts is easy to summarize, even though it is impossible to be exact. Of the 6000 or so languages in the world, in the course of the present century – an average of one language is dying out every two weeks or so. It is a rate of loss unprecedented in recorded history.

  But, it is important to stress that all dominant languages are involved in the disappearance of the less-spoken and written languages. The impact of dominant languages on minority languages is a matter of universal concern, and the role of English is especially implicated. The growth of English as a global language is not the sole factor in explaining language endangerment. Although, it is English that has been the critical factor in the disappearance of languages in such parts of the world as Australia and North America, this language is of little relevance when we consider the corresponding losses that have taken place in South America or in many parts of Asia, where such languages as Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic and Chinese have replaced local languages. Nor, for that matter, it is always the chief factor in colonial Africa, where inter-ethnic and inter-religious rivalries at a local level are often the reason for the endangerment of a particular language.

A language dies when the last person who speaks it dies or as some people say, it dies when “the second-last person has nobody to talk to”. A language lives on, after these deaths, only if it has been written down or recorded in some way. When people die, they leave signs for their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds and artifacts – in a word, their archaeology. But, spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies which has never been documented, it is as if it has never been.

In a survey which was published in 1999 by the US Summer Institute of Linguistics Organisation, Ethnologne, there were fifty-one languages with just one speaker left – twenty eight of them in Australia alone. There were 500 languages in the world with fewer than 100 speakers; 1500 with fewer than 1000 speakers; over 3000 languages with fewer than 10,000 speakers; and a staggering 5000 languages with fewer than 1,00,000 speakers. It turns out that 96% of the world’s languages are spoken by just 4% of the people. It is perhaps no wonder that so many languages are in danger. The figure of 1,00,000 in the examples of endangered languages, sometimes takes people by surprise. So, is a language with 1,00,000 speakers safe? The evidence is to the contrary. Such a language is not going to die next week or next year; there is no guarantee that it will be surviving in a couple of generations. It does not take a language long to disappear, once the will to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

The sequence of events affecting the endangered languages seems to be the same everywhere. The main reason can be – the present generation becomes increasingly proficient in the new language, identifying more with it, and finding their first language less relevant to their new needs. This is often accompanied by a feeling of shame about using the old languages, on the part of the parents as well as the children. Parents use the old language less and less with their children, or in front of their children, and when more children come to be born within the ‘new society’, there are obviously fewer opportunities to use that language.

Within a generation – sometimes even within a decade – a healthy bilingualism within a family can slip into a self-conscious semi-lingualism, and hence into a mono-lingualism which places that language one step nearer to extinction.

SUBMITTED BY:                  NEERAJA B. SHRINGERI

                                                1^ST SEMESTER, B.A. (H.E.E.)