Grammar For The People

One of life’s simple pleasures is when a little known country that you barely ever hear about or know anything of suddenly pops up in the news, usually for something utterly ridiculous, because no one would really bother reporting about them if they did something completely humdrum like sign a defence agreement or participate in an economic forum. Take Tajikistan, for example. You would think it’s a run of the mill, rugged central Asian country with a rugged landscape, rugged people and even more rugged rulers that suppress all art and culture. It’s so obscure a country that even Narendra Modi would not visit it on his foreign sojourns, and he loves descending upon all manner of countries popular or obscure to sign some new treaty that will boost bilateral trade tenfold and raise India’s profile and stoke the fires of patriotism amongst Indian diaspora there with an elaborate function reminiscent of those pointless opening ceremony extravaganzas they hold at all those multinational sporting events. Coming back to Tajikistan, it sounds like the sort of country where discontented ex-Soviets collude with other unruly elements to foment Jihad and smuggle arms and indulge in the illegal trafficking of narcotics. In short, it’s the sort of country about which if Borat made up something outlandish about people engaging in unnatural acts with their donkeys you’d probably believe it.

One of these slices of life’s simple pleasures did materialize a few months ago, in the form of news that the Tajikistan government would start fining journalists for using ‘incomprehensible’ words in their articles. To impress upon others just how out of hand the whole situation had gotten, Gavhar Sharifzoda, the head of the state language committee and quite possibly the world’s first governmental grammar nazi, said that there were cases where journalists used as many as 10 words in one day that the simple reader could not comprehend. I’m generally one for minimum governance – I don’t see the need for the government to botch up something that can be messed up perfectly well by private enterprise, but 10 words really takes the cake. If it were 3 or 4 one could’ve turned a blind eye to it; maybe even at 5 or 6 a simple slap on the wrists would suffice, but by the time you reach 10 incomprehensible words, it surely calls for government intervention at the highest level!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: If a strange law had to be passed somewhere, Tajikistan sounds like just the country that would do it. It’s the kind of country you can easily imagine passing a law stating that people cannot leave the egg yolk for the end while they’re having a sunny side up, or that a restaurant owner has the right to fire his chef if he breaks more than 15% of the yolks while making eggs sunny side up. Now, I don’t know about you, but I recently got three consecutive sunny side ups messed up – a new low even for someone who doesn’t have a stellar record when it comes to sunny side ups. I probably have a lifetime average of just a little over 50%, which is utterly shit for someone who makes sunny side ups pretty regularly. But it isn’t as easy as it looks, is it? First, you have to crack the egg just right, and even if you do that, you’re immediately under pressure because you then have to gently ease it on to the frying pan, making sure to drop it at just the right height so the yolk stays intact. By now you’re all relaxed and complacent as a perfectly round yolk stares back at you from the frying pan – little aware that another opportunity for peril is just round the corner in the form of the final hurdle of getting it on to the plate without any mishap. It’s just too much pressure!

Daft as the Tajikistan government’s order is when it comes to newspaper articles, one should always be happy when governments are occupied spending all their time coming up with such orders. Closer home, take the order on national anthems, for example. Not only did someone put in a lot of thought to arrive at the conclusion that the best time to make everyone’s heart swell with patriotic pride was just before a movie, they even took the trouble to go to great lengths to arrive at guidelines for how the national anthem should be played, at what angle should the flag be displayed, whether doors needed to be shut while this is happening, and so on.

You’re well entitled to think “Hey, but I’ve paid good money in the form of taxes. I want some roll-up-the-sleeves-and-get-the-hands-dirty governmenting happening, goddamnit, and not guidelines on national anthems, massive PR exercises on cleaner India and bloated rhetoric on self-sacrifice.” The risk though, is that when the government does actual work, it’s probably worse. It’s all fine saying the only thing the Congress government did was corruption, or that the only thing the Modi government does is PR. But when the government actually gets around to work, you’ll land up with the colossal mess that’s demonetization. Or travel bans – look at Donald Trump. Everyone thought that like all other politicians, his election promises would only be that – false promises broken as soon as he came to power. Now that he’s actually implementing it, a horrific apocalypse seems upon us and suddenly even Nixon seemed like he was a fine, upstanding man worthy of public office!