I would like to share my experience of a bit of my travel across different places in south India. After looking at the plight of kannada in Bengaluru and few other big cities in Karnataka, I thought of passing on my thoughts and experiences to people to make them realise of their mistake !
Travelling to Chennai, one of the 4 major metro's in India. Starting from boarding the bus from my home to KBS to Chennai bus station, the things that have happened were shocking for me. I was going there for a short term training. I boarded the local mass transport, got the ticket and a man standing next to me asking for a ticket "bus stand ka ek ticket dena conductor" and the conductor replied " kis bus stand jana hai aapko ?". I appreciated conductor's hindi language. Then switched to a local FM Radio and heard RJ yelling "This is radio Mirchi and next song coming up is rang de basanti from the hit movie rang de basanti" and he played quite a lot of hindi songs and he was talking in english with hardly a few kannada words in it. I was taken aback but kept myself calm and did not ignite any thinking about kannada in peril. I was in the bus stand waiting for the bus. I was about 20 minutes early to the terminus to make sure that I dont miss the bus caught in terrible traffic. I saw rickshaw drivers surrounding a bus that had just landed into the terminus from Tamil nadu, and impressing incoming people with their Tamil skills "sir, inga vaanga sir" . That was a bus from Tamil nadu transport system and name of the destination i.e., Bengaluru was in tamil. I was watching all the rickshaw drivers getting a good deal and going away with men. Few disappointed drivers starting running to another bus that had just landed from Tirupathi, Andhra Pradesh and were trying to entice people alighting with their telugu skills and were pretty successful and the name of the destination of the bus was in Telugu. I then started thinking did I see any name in Kannada except in rare occassion in the city. Is this development or putting your identity in peril in the name of development?. I tried to keep thoughts aside and diverted my attention on the news daily I had at hand. I started reading it, turned to the page containing cinema and stuff. Oh dear God, completely occupied by success of tamil movies, telugu movies and hindi movies. Kannada movies ????
nowhere in the sight, and it was at the corner that I found about Kannada movies.
My bus arrived and I had to head on. Since it was KSRTC bus, I expected kannada in the bus and to my amazement, bus conductor presuming the travellers as tamilians was collecting fare from them communicating in Tamil. I spoke in Kannada and showed my reservation. The bus had hardly crossed Kolar district of Karnataka, that I was seeing the posters and sign boards in both the languages which should have been in Kannada alone instead. I expected the same in the tamil nadu border of Karnataka and I did not get to see one.
Finally Chennai, again the rickshaw drivers flocking but surprisingly they were not yelling in kannada. First Blow. It was hard for me to go the office in bus as no one spoke either hindi or english, on the first day. First meeting with my boss also surprised me when he told me that it is very much necessary to learn tamil. It was a sunday morning that I planned to head out for a movie and chips. I bought a daily and was going through the cinema section and Kannada movies are nowhere in the sight unlike in Kannada newspapers where other language movies hit your eye even if you dont want to read about them. Finally I found "Mungaru Male" in a luxurious theatre and I expected a cut out of Ganesh or a couple of posters across the road and I was taken aback to see none around the theatre or on my way to the theatre either unlike in Bangalore where you see Cut-out's of Rajini Kanth and Chiranjeevi almost everywhere near Majestic. 3 months of hard living in Chennai was nightmarish, which like I expected to be a multilingual like Bangalore turned out to be monolingual and a place difficult to be lived without tamil. It was the final day of training, day of bidding adieu to fellow trainees and the boss. Managed to travel to the bus stand and this time around it was a Tamil nadu state transport bus that I managed to get. I expected some kannada but was terribly disappointed to see that he did not speak it. That is when I realised how our own people are holding others high at the price of their self-respect, identity, bowing to pressures and selling their souls to impress upon migrating people and everything in the name of globalisation or socio-economic development. At the least 20 percent of tamilians intent to save their Language and culture should have been in Kannadigas, is what I feel. pity !!!
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