{"id":236,"date":"2016-07-17T01:36:47","date_gmt":"2016-07-17T01:36:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=236"},"modified":"2016-07-17T01:36:47","modified_gmt":"2016-07-17T01:36:47","slug":"humbly-submitted-for-your-esteemed-perusal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arre.co.in\/?p=236","title":{"rendered":"Humbly Submitted for Your Esteemed Perusal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<em>\u00a0\n<p><span class=\"dropcap\">W<\/span>e humbly request the pleasure of your gracious presence on the auspicious occasion to shower the newly-weds with your kind blessings.<\/p><\/em>\n\nI had almost put away the invitation but something made me pick it up again and read the sentence above slowly and carefully. It was the most extraordinary sentence, yet completely de rigueur for wedding cards. These people, whom I barely knew, were begging, nay, prostrating themselves before me, requesting me to attend the event that marked the end of their son\u2019s carefree existence. Yes, he would forevermore have his whiskey with half-soda, half-water, and full guilt.\n\nBut enough of chauvinistic marriage tropes. The marriage wasn\u2019t really the thing here, achieved, as it was, by a cosmic sleight of hand or \u201cthe Grace of the Almighty\u201d. No, the real deal was me and my \u201cgracious presence\u201d. Why, they would be absolutely distraught if I didn\u2019t show up. I was planning to go just for the butter chicken and gulab jamun served with ice cream. Going to a wedding is like visiting a restaurant where you don\u2019t have to pay, but only have to tip a couple who thought it was a costume party and have come dressed as chandeliers. Now I obviously had to pack in my \u201ckind blessings\u201d as well. And a means to shower them. Perhaps, a \u201chealth faucet\u201d of some kind.\n\nIn our country this sort of exaggerated, sugary-sweet politeness isn\u2019t limited to wedding cards alone, but extends to all formal occasions and official communication. \u201cRespected Ma\u2019am and Sir\u201d, \u201cHonourable so-and-so\u201d, \u201cI humbly submit\u201d. An alien race judging us solely on the language of formal discourse would conclude we were the most peaceable, polite, and pacifist society in the galaxy. If they decided to visit the most hospitable place based on language they would show up in Uttar Pradesh. Needless to say, within minutes of arriving they would be divested of their flying saucer by gun-wielding legislators, roundly abused by eight-year-olds for landing in the middle of their cricket pitch, and lathi-charged by the UP police.\n\nThere is an inherent insincerity and hypocrisy about our formal communications and it is inevitable that this influences our behaviour and ways of thinking. For all our outward politeness we are fairly seething inside; something we\u2019ve built up over centuries. In an absolute monarchy with constant power struggles and intrigues, politeness must have developed as a survival tactic. You simply could not afford to get on anyone\u2019s bad side, because you didn\u2019t know when you might need someone\u2019s help. It pre-supposes that work will never get done purely on merit and that you will be at someone\u2019s mercy.\n\nThis perhaps reinforces what social scientists Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson propounded in their Politeness Theory of 1978. The theory states that people have a social self-image that they consciously project and try to protect. They called this sense of self-image \u201cface\u201d. According to the theory we all have a positive face and a negative face.\n\nPositive face seeks affirmation and approval of our self-image by others. Negative face is that part of our personality that doesn\u2019t like to be imposed upon. In life, situations arise that may threaten either one of our two faces. Brown and Levinson theorise that politeness is a strategy to deal with precisely such potentially \u201cface-threatening actions\u201d.\n<blockquote class=\"quote--center\">We\u2019ve gone ahead and inherited British extravagance and hypocrisy in official language but we certainly have not inherited their sense of humour.<\/blockquote>\nThe \u201cpositive face\u201d and \u201cpolite language\u201d then seems to be an insurance policy of sorts against an uncertain and potentially threatening future. But this is not how this kind of language came into being. High-flown language may have developed as a means of officialdom to isolate itself from common folk. Artisans and workers used, and continue to use, a direct and efficient form of communication. Ostentatious language became both a symptom and a tool of power. It was prevalent in Brahminical society, medieval India, and institutionalised in British India. It was only in 2012 that President Pranab Mukherjee finally dropped the customary prefix of \u201cHis Excellency\u201d while addressing the President or governors of Indian States (replacing it with \u201cHonourable\u201d). To this day when a Government officer asks you to \u201cwrite an application\u201d (in triplicate) it is generally a euphemism for \u201cgrovel\u201d.\n\nNowhere is language more long-winded and absurd than in our courts of law. The entire setup is theatrical. The principal players wear weird black capes; a Superman-as-Hamlet type outfit. One guy gets to sit on a high chair and is called \u201cMy Lord\u201d. A plaintiff has to submit a \u201cprayer\u201d and await judgement. The judgements pronounced by My Lord can be mind boggling. The following is the first sentence of a 268-page(!) Supreme Court judgement on the law of criminal defamation delivered a few weeks ago: \u201cThis batch of writ petitions preferred under Article 32 of the Constitution of India exposits cavil in its quintessential conceptuality and percipient discord between venerated and exalted right of freedom of speech and expression of an individual, exploring manifold and multilayered, limitless, unbounded and unfettered spectrums, and the controls, restrictions and constrictions, under the assumed power of \u201creasonableness\u201d ingrained in the statutory provisions relating to criminal law to reviver and uphold one\u2019s reputation.\u201d HOLY SHITE! I\u2019d rather read Ulysses (otherwise known as the greatest book no one\u2019s ever read).\n\nWhenever I, by some mischance, encounter a \u201cjudgement\u201d, I feel something akin to a hand-blender whirring inside my cranium, turning my brain to mush.\n\nWe\u2019ve gone ahead and inherited British extravagance and hypocrisy in official language but we certainly have not inherited their sense of humour. John Bercow, Speaker of the UK\u2019s House of Commons, also doubles up as a comedic talent formidable enough to rival fellow countryman John Oliver. On YouTube, Speaker Bercow can be seen calling an MP \u201chonourable gentleman\u201d, \u201cexcitable fellow\u201d, and \u201ccheeky chappie\u201d in the same sentence. In fact, the British Parliament as a whole seems like a group of people who have taken the Bard\u2019s words, about the world being a stage, to heart. The proceedings of the UK\u2019s House of Commons are, in general, the most entertaining farce one can hope to see, but they would be considerably more agreeable if they didn\u2019t have the undesirable side-effect of lethal bombing campaigns and war.\n\nSo is there any hope of us ever saying what we mean and meaning what we say? My friend, serial entrepreneur, corporate monk, and life enthusiast Sunny Narang certainly thinks so. He feels that the linguistically disingenuous class of Indians are facing a very real challenge from two disparate emerging classes. One is the\u00a0strongman\/politician\/criminal who is too badass to bother with social niceties. They know that power flows out of the barrel of a gun, influence, and the sackfuls of cash in the back of their Toyota Fortuner (the Land Rover Evoque is for their kids).\n\nThe other class is the young professionals, entrepreneurs, and innovators who are too busy with their work and ideas to bother about social equations, favours, and graces. (These are people who might call the aforementioned \u201chealth faucet\u201d a \u201cbum gun\u201d.) They are the people who juggle a job, kids, a hellish commute, and still make time for a candlelight vigil against an injustice. These are people who are not that bothered about where they, or anyone else, comes from but are interested in where they are going. These are the people who junk polite hypocrisy, not for rudeness, but for decency and I\u2019ll happily join them.\n\nRight after I wash the wedding card glitter off my hands.\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>High-flown language may have developed as a means of officialdom to isolate itself from common folk but thanks to our feudal hangover, we continue to embrace it in our daily lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":237,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[62,63,64,65,66,67,414,415,416,71,72,417],"class_list":["post-236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pov","tag-arre","tag-arre-digital-platform","tag-arre-originals","tag-arre-reads","tag-arre-text-articles","tag-arre-website","tag-feudal-hangover","tag-polite","tag-politeness","tag-web-series","tag-web-shows","tag-weddings"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Humbly Submitted for Your Esteemed Perusal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"High-flown language may have developed as a means of officialdom to isolate itself from common folk but thanks to our feudal hangover, we continue to embrace it in our 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