Urban vision blind to the poor and their languages

The Boston area of the United States of America (USA) has a good public transportation system comprising buses, local trains, boats and the metro rail. The Red Line is one of the metro routes, stopping at Harvard and MIT, the two institutions where I have spent all of my academic-professional life outside Bengal. One of the stations on the route is called Porter Square. Soon after the metro leaves a stop, a recorded voice lets the passengers know what the next station is. That voice says 'Porter Square' in a very Bostonian accent. That is apt since the metro is in Boston, most users of the metro are from Boston and that is the accent they are most comfortable with. A democratic commitment to local stakeholders doesn't make Boston any less 'world-class'.

USA exists much beyond its territorial limits. Specks of California and Manhattan are scattered in urban centres of our subcontinent. Here, in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore and beyond, those specks of Americana exist vigorously, thanks to the brown-outside-white-inside coconut desis whose rootlessness attracts them to these 'cosmopolitan' areas. The subcontinent lives with such offsprings, proudly alienated, consciously 'liberated' and hip. With sentences peppered with 'like' and liberally spreading their sh*t, cr*p, and other four-letter jewels among the rest of us, they constantly want to signify their 'cosmopolitan' awareness and maturity. Picking up expressions of their life's many moments not from their living environment but from American/western popular media styles is the principal marker of these types.

Given their numbers, they wouldn't have mattered but they wield inordinate power over policy and public life, given 'English mediates our own social hierarchy', as Hartosh Bal astutely puts it. They speak English in 'cafes' and restaurants, Hindi to their domestic helps. They prefer to live within self-created bubbles where they perform predictable 'firangi duniya'-philia rituals with a commitment that often amuses the West. This is like the amusement of a father who has just come to know that the rape he had committed actually resulted in a child who loves him more than its mother.

The coconuts lament that brown cities are not 'outsider' friendly — rather rich that coming from voluntary outsiders in their birth-lands. They lament that the buses, street signs, shop names still display so much 'vernacular'. This constant reminder of brown-ness is an eyesore that they have successfully removed from their bubbles. Their all-English restaurant menus, their all English working spaces, get-togethers, poetry-readings, book-launches, debates, discussions, malls and supermarkets help them, at least in certain hours during their daily life, forget the horrid brown land whose imprint they carry, whether they like it or not. If the city ain't, at least the bubble should be 'world class' — which is a code for a place where a firang would not feel lost. The fact is that in the last couple of decades, in the language of street names, public signages, private spaces and much more, the staggering majority of the people have been progressively told to 'get lost'.

The poor and their language have been excluded for long. Now the middle-class is besieged. In brownland, telecallers start in English or Hindi by default, whether it is in Chennai or Bhubaneshwar. We are staring at an increasingly exclusionary urban vision that is undemocratic and downright insensitive, consciously overcounting the few and ignoring the majority.

Yet, our languages live among the people on whose backbreaking work everything is made, while angreziwalas have their sausage, wine, banter and sophistication. If there is good in this universe or there are divine powers that care about human dignity, something must give.

The author is a brain scientist at MIT @gargac