Indian English-wise

While in America recently, around evening on the Pacific coast, someone said to me and my friends, 'Go speak to Brad, he'll hook you up, he'll take you out, you'll catch some waves. Sweet.' I completely understood what they were saying and knew that never in my life would I have been able to come up with that sentence myself.

Having a shared language but such different cultures is like giving two kids exactly the same box of Lego and telling them each to build a house. The sensible one will build one with doors and windows, the maverick will go for a house with no doors that only magic people can enter, or something with more gun turrets than houses traditionally need. The point is they'll use the same building blocks, language, to construct the same thing, a meaningful sentence, but because of their differing characteristics they'll do it in a different way. Everyone knows this already. I just wanted to talk about Lego.

India has the same Lego set as us and the United States. It too is an English speaking nation. But if India were involved in this hypothetical house building test then its finished product would look a lot like what would happen if the Deathstar contract had gone to cowboy builders. Indian English is, to a Brit, mad. It is far, far madder than anything we have. It is incredibly hyperbolic, energetic and it is, most probably, the future of our language. So we better learn a bit. The good news here is that it's a marked improvement on our way of doing things.

The first and biggest blessing is that spelling, within certain circles, is looked down on. In others it is the first thing out the window in the rush to communicate. I've never been a fan of spelling so I like the sound of this.

Then there is the wonderful vocabulary and idioms of Indian English. Most famous is 'prepone': to bring something forward in time. That makes sense, if you can postpone an meeting you can also prepone it. There's the bizarre and ubiquitous use of the suffix -wise. It can go on the end of anything; sellotape-wise, to do with sellotape, school-wise, museum-wise, truth-wise, breast-wise. Whatever you fancy goes. My favourite of the idioms I've come across is 'out of station', equivalent to 'out of office'. That goes back to the time of the Raj, apparently, when the British rulers would go out of station when they toured the area.

By far the best thing about Indian English though is the indefinable, its style. Here's an example of what I mean. It's taken from the company history of one of India's leading education company's and the paragraph is talking about the impact of their interactive lessons and course material.

 The result was amazing. Knowledge flourished freed from the centuries old bonds of books and chalk and blackboard. A new light of understanding dawned on young awakened minds. And the classroom became a fascinating place to be in... And the teacher smiled as she now saw not just one, two or three but a sea of hands go up every time she asked a question.

I don't believe any Brit, born with a heightened sensitivity to looking a fool as we are, could ever have banged that out.