Arpit Agarwal

The Prime Minister of Nepal arrived at the formal sitting of Parliament to instill disregard for the institution itself, the President of the Republic, the parliamentarians and electorate. Evident in his refusal to address the House, distanced and unsmiling, casual attire and footwear, and walkout midway through the presidential address.

When I joined TV, I had to unlearn the language of academia. TV news had to fight to be heard back then, with the pressure cooker in the kitchen, the landline ringing, and low-quality speakers on TV sets. You couldn't watch it 'on demand' using a pair of headphones. So, our scripts had to be in the lowest common denominator English - something you could grasp with the least available attention. Yet, the average English news watcher - admittedly, a very small number in those days - was probably better read than today. They understood nuances, a pun, or an occasional turn of phrase. And these included people with heavy accents, who mostly spoke in their mother tongue, and their English had been gleaned from books and cinema. Today, we have a larger population of English speakers: Many young people speak English at home, even when their parents are not necessarily fluent. But their vocabulary is much narrower than the previous generation's. They are unable to understand metaphors, allusions, or any of the standard devices of better speech. This is the fruit of decades of disdain that we have nurtured towards good literature, and an overwhelming turn towards Managementspeak ('revert', 'noted', 'circle back', 'basis this'). I find this not just in English, but among Hindi speakers too. The Hindi journalists I first encountered in NDTV fascinated me with the breadth of their language, all that it could capture and describe. The younger breed speak a cross between street lingo and officialese. This corrosive decline is a symptom of a deeper malaise in our society, and there is no immediate cure in sight.