Sapir Whorf hypothesis in action or thereabouts

Sapir Whorf hypothesis is a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken. I believe it follows that if the structure is ‘deficient’ in some sense,  the thought and behaviour is also correspondingly ‘deficient’.  Since Language is a great differentiator along cultural as well as linguistic lines, one can also safely extrapolate that the cultures that are deficient, sufficient or rich in language may also be respectively and accordingly so.
I believe it should be explained that, the experiences common to a cultural group are the foundations on which their shared values, beliefs and assumptions (in short, culture) are built, generates appropriate sounds, inflections, phonemes, morphemes, semantics, syntax and all the other units that are used to describe language and that is why language and culture as so inseparable and is a more complete argument. Language does not originate from a vacuum as is implied by the Sapir Whorf hypothesis as stated above.


It follows therefore that by analysing the language and perhaps arriving at the unique expressions of a linguistic group one may reverse trace the original experiences of that group. Since we cannot usually go back in time, it may remain a matter of conjecture and a plausible one, nevertheless is a good intellectual pursuit if one is inclined so.  So did my argument of ‘barabar’ for ‘right?’ or ‘okay?’ of the Gujaratis, while the original in Hindi means ‘equal’. Ok for equal I argued is an expression of the underlying industrial, commercial instinct of the Gujarati of something of equal value given in return and therefore a fair transaction and therefore ok. This is more in line with discourse analysis with some extrapolations.

I witnessed two expressions of Mallus which indicated the thought process in Hindi which happened to be the local language from childhood, but when forced to speak to listeners who were predominantly Mallu it gave away the structure of the original Hindi though in Malayalam it made less sense or grammatically no sense. The expression was ‘varaan koduthilla’ which is no expression in Malayalam but a translation of ‘aane nahi diya’ in which made perfect sense in Hindi and meant ‘did not allow entry’.

Similar was another boy’s expression ‘patti kadichu karega’ in Malayalam and Hindi mix which was a translation of the Hindi ‘kutha kaatta karega’ which means ‘the dog will bite’ or more specifically ‘the dog will do the bite’ in Hindi but no such expression existed in Malayalam or English. Can we extrapolate therefore that in spite of being born to Malayali parents, because of the upbringing  in the North, these children are more likely North Indian culturally?

Of debates and its corruption: Burning issue

Dear Arnabji,

I am fully aware of the ‘argumentative Indian’ epithet given to us Indians by none other than the Nobel laureate and apart from the book though, always wondered whether it is more compliment or a sarcasm.

I do believe with aging I have come to conclude that the term argumentative is less of a compliment, generally though of course to argue as in a court of law is not a negative term, but is in the sense of presenting one’s case forcefully and convincingly and with logic.

Like many things in India which are on top of the other for instance the traffic where one lane is on top of the other, judging the way people drive, the cyclist, the two wheeler, the three wheeler, the four wheeler, six wheeler or any wheeler chooses himself to be in any of the lanes they sweetly prefer to be which make me wonder one lane is on top of the other. Not to mention the pedestrian and cattle preferring a perpendicular lane and now a days the new gen bikers with  a definitive preference for a ‘crass – cross’ lane amidst the other lanes. Some foreigner even took it to the extreme of commenting that the Indian road chaos is nothing but a way of max optimising the road usage with any little empty space at any given time, used irrespective of the rightful lane though with scant regard  for crossing the lane ‘left, right and centre’ which happens to be the name of a similar programme on another channel. His argument was that the number of accidents, given the chaos, was too little as to be ignored while the system worked nonetheless with a certain efficiency.

I am reminded of the same argument while trying to listen to watching your programme ‘Burning issue’ with the ominous flames on the screen. Every speaker speaks away at his own sweet convenience irrespective of and disrespective of whether someone else is speaking or not. True other channels also show similar tendencies, but your channel has taken it to an artful din a la ‘artful dodger’ of Oliver Twist fame.  I wonder at the role of the journo at such a juncture. Is your job to provoke further din by poking them adding more argumentative fuel to the melting idiot cauldron. I am not convinced ‘the nation has a right to know’ when what is being said to be known is barely decipherable in the cacophony.

In fact I always thought may be wrongly, the job of the journo is to be a moderator a la debate in such circumstances for the benefit of the decorum and the listener and for the process and for the outcome which is a truth, a perspective or more clarity and conclusion on the matter at discussion.

The argumentative Indian or the debater on the idiot box speaks away a priori argumentative axiomatic truth with nary a budge from the original position. Where is the debate then? Shouldn’t there be a withholding of a priori posturing and an openness to the views, a respect for the opposition and above all a respect for the opposite party’s right to disagree, a cornerstone of liberal democracy itself?  Shouldn’t debate be dynamically adaptive to the views of the other debaters and to the insightful comments of the moderator?

Instead ‘we the nation’ has to listen to the debater and the moderator ‘one on top of the other’ in the evening time a la chaotic traffic of the daytime. When the one who is supposed to be the moderator of the burning passion is the one hogging the most time in which case it might as well be a speech or a lecture, why do you need a debate to display the debating skills of the moderator. Isn’t it like the traffic warden joining the chaotic traffic down from his pedestal?

I am not surprised at the admirers of the show who all belong to  the class ‘argumentative Indian’ now that we cannot escape the epithet, but I wonder what they admire other than the chaos. Even the rashest driver in the country wishes secretly for the day when our traffic is streamlined and less congested and orderly a la the developed countries. Isn’t moving towards more sobriety, especially in the public space, a sign of maturing and isn’t moving the society towards more maturity a journalistic endeavour too?

Or is there a primeval instinct in us to enjoy chaos on the box and on the streets? I was reminded of the large retail store that did research and found that the Indian consumer actually wanted and preferred the store to be chaotic a la local kirana  store and hence the artificial chaos adopted in some of the new gen stores.

Have you also done your homework and found that the Indian listener would rather listen to many voices at the same time and speak at the same time with two hoots to the other speakers? If so then what is being debated, what is the conclusion or  synthesis when  the one who is supposed to be the synthesiser also joining the din with apparently legitimate journalistic right? We the listener has a right to know…. Alas…

To be abroad to be happy......

  

The two or three lines of people standing in a queue reminded one of all roads leading to Rome. The father and son enquired about the queue.

“This one is 9.30, that one 10 and the other one 10.30.”

They were referring to the times scheduled and the people were, quite uncharacteristically for this country, standing in their respective queues.

2 beggar women in their 60s or 70s were vigorously begging amidst the queues. Theirs was a cheerful begging as if they were so happy these people were moving to the Promised Land. Getting a permission was next to impossible. While the beggars went about their cheerful business for the day, the people in the queue wore an anxious disposition in complete contrast. All the wear and tear of the application, the schedule, the timing, the documents, the invitations, admissions, bank statements, salary certificates, returns, the anticipated questions and possible rejection were writ large on their faces. Some of them wore clothes that they would eventually wear in the Promised Land. Only the parents on a visit to their techie kids wore the village attire. But it was evident that they considered themselves different from their pure village folk.

A little girl’s little finger was on the fingers of her mother and as they joined the queue and the conversation, the beggar woman came with an anticipatory triumphant appreciative smile as if she was blessing in pride of the mother and child that they get the permission. The little girl looked at the mother’s face and then at the beggar woman’s then back at the mother’s face in surprise at this unusual delay of sympathy on the mother’s side.

Inside the gates in the lobby to the office, the same queues were repeated but without the local beggars and the grime of the streets. The anxiety remained though. The anticipatory triumph of getting the permission was concealed under an artificial submission in deference to the near omnipotent authority.

Just by the flyover three cars hit bumper to bumper as the auto driver in front unexpectedly stalled to take a U turn. People showered curses at him, but he muttered he had broken no law. He was so legalistic that the cars needed repair for his fault though no law was broken. Inadequate infrastructure did contribute to the bum to the bumper, he implied. To be abroad to be happy in this country is a strange destiny…?

Sapir Whorf hypothesis in action or thereabouts

Sapir Whorf hypothesis in action or thereabouts

Sapir Whorf hypothesis is a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken. I believe it follows that if the structure is ‘deficient’ in some sense,  the thought and behaviour is also correspondingly ‘deficient’.  Since Language is a great differentiator along cultural as well as linguistic lines, one can also safely extrapolate that the cultures that are deficient, sufficient or rich in language may also be respectively and accordingly so.
I believe it should be explained that, the experiences common to a cultural group are the foundations on which their shared values, beliefs and assumptions (in short, culture) are built, generates appropriate sounds, inflections, phonemes, morphemes, semantics, syntax and all the other units that are used to describe language and that is why language and culture as so inseparable and is a more complete argument. Language does not originate from a vacuum as is implied by the Sapir Whorf hypothesis as stated above.

It follows therefore that by analysing the language and perhaps arriving at the unique expressions of a linguistic group one may reverse trace the original experiences of that group. Since we cannot usually go back in time, it may remain a matter of conjecture and a plausible one, nevertheless is a good intellectual pursuit if one is inclined so.  So did my argument of ‘barabar’ for ‘right?’ or ‘okay?’ of the Gujaratis, while the original in Hindi means ‘equal’. Ok for equal I argued is an expression of the underlying industrial, commercial instinct of the Gujarati of something of equal value given in return and therefore a fair transaction and therefore ok. This is more in line with discourse analysis with some extrapolations.

I witnessed two expressions of Mallus which indicated the thought process in Hindi which happened to be the local language from childhood, but when forced to speak to listeners who were predominantly Mallu it gave away the structure of the original Hindi though in Malayalam it made less sense or grammatically no sense. The expression was ‘varaan koduthilla’ which is no expression in Malayalam but a translation of ‘aane nahi diya’ in which made perfect sense in Hindi and meant ‘did not allow entry’.

Similar was another boy’s expression ‘patti kadichu karega’ in Malayalam and Hindi mix which was a translation of the Hindi ‘kutha kaatta karega’ which means ‘the dog will bite’ or more specifically ‘the dog will do the bite’ in Hindi but no such expression existed in Malayalam or English. Can we extrapolate therefore that in spite of being born to Malayali parents, because of the upbringing  in the North, these children are more likely North Indian culturally?  More later......

Resident's Associations

The article I wrote for the Eastern Villas Residents' Association 10th anniversary souvenir -2014

Residents’ Associations:

A sociological perspective

Human sociological history can be traced  generally from the tribal through the agricultural, the industrial and the post industrial.

Affiliations to the larger group to which one belongs assumes different forms in different stages of growth of a society.  Man is a social animal and being in a community is a fundamental human attribute. At various stages of human social development, the nature of communities have  undergone changes as well.  The group is the unit of social analysis, and  community is the unit of sociological analysis, just as the fundamental unit of psychological analysis is the individual.

In the most primitive of human communities, groups of families aggregated into clan and clans into tribes. Affiliations of kith and kin were centred on the clan. The in-group and the out-group were decided by whether one belonged to this tribe or that.

As groups of tribes moved in search of livelihood, mostly on hunting gathering mode, these became grouped and regrouped into newer clans and newer affiliations. Over a period of time these developed into newer tribes and so on. At the most primitive, these affiliations were decided by birth into a certain clan and tribe. Marital relations were usually across families and sometimes across clans, but were least across tribes.

In earliest societies, the social identity was around the belongingness to the tribe. At  a certain stage as people settled, the geographic also took importance and the village name assumed a certain force in social identity. This may have coincided with greater specialization in society with people taking up more functionally segmented occupations. Thus the family  plus the village became the demarcators of identity. Sometimes, village names are used as part of names even today.

A house name indicated clan or family to which one belonged. Village life and roles were centred on agriculture, the main occupation of the majority. Industrial development brought about large migrations to the urban from the rural. Alongside there was a shift in roles centred on specializations of occupations. Unlike the village and the earlier tribal existence, this mode is characterized by the aggregation of different people of various occupations and specializations in close proximity.

This would mean that though there is physical proximity, there is very little of psychological proximity due to requirements of specialization. The village farmer’s neighbour was the village farmer, who shared the same concerns of his farmer neighbour. The urban occupational specialist’s neighbour is a specialist of another occupation in a different work domain,  which means his day to day mental transitions and concerns are different from his neighbours’. The main concerns also have transited from the physical to the conceptual.

Much of the urban insensitivity to the proximate can be attributed to the above fact. One’s daily occupational concerns are spatially distal and temporally different. Urban society can therefore be an agglomeration only in the physical sense but not in the social sense, at least not in the same social sense of a pre-industrial one. In a post-industrial information technology enabled society, the physical proximity is even replaced by technological possibility. Proximity itself takes a different meaning due to technological possibility. One’s cousin who is physically proximate has less in common than one’s technologically proximate colleague or acquaintance.  Like mindedness is sought and found across portals than across the neighbourly fence.

Residents Associations are a certain attempt to bring in the benefits of an earlier kind of neighbourliness to a post agricultural society. The behaviour requirements of such a society demand a certain subordination of narrow interests in favour of a more actively co-operative contribution of one’s talents and abilities for the common good. The attitudes and values of minimal interference daily, but maximum support in times of need and all for common good, are foundations to the smooth functioning of a residential association. Unproblematizing the problematic, rather than problematizing the unproblematic and resolution through discussion and consensus are reflective of a mature community in our democratic tradition.  Issues that can be resolved internally need be resolved internally through mediation if need be. Such a mature community when replicated in all locales can give rise to a strong larger community that is our Nation and ultimately a peaceful world. In an interconnected world where problems can spill over to the detriment of all, standing for the benefit of the whole community is not an option, but a necessity.