To Speak In A Basic Tongue

Call it a pathetic fallacy if you will, but among many popular theories-like the one that says God is male-there exists another perception that the www is English. The truth is quite the contrary. For an ever-increasing number of people, who either studied Newton’s theories in Hindi, or didn’t study at all, the web today is a tool that understands their mother tongue. That’s why a Punjabi truck driver who reaches Indore sends a mail to Ludhiana saying Pahunch gaye si (I’ve arrived). And that’s why a farmer from the cow belt singes the lines with these words to his son in the US: Aur Kitna paisa dubayega tu? (How much more money are you going to waste?). Or why an elderly man in Karachi tells his Baroda-based friend in Urdu (written in the Gujarati script) that, but for the fact that Pakistani women are prettier, we’re all the same.

This phenomenal cross-continental and cross-cultural communication has become possible because of a software called e-patra, which allows one to communicate in most Indian languages. All one needs to do is just type in English and the message is automatically ‘transliterated’ into any popular Indian language. For example, if a user selects Hindi and types out Kaise Ho?, the message will be conveyed in the Hindi script. Thus, for a generation of people who have nested far away from home and so far felt a trifle embarrassed about mailing to mother in English, sites like webduniya.com and mailjol.com have shown a way out. And, quite like what the Indian postal department used to do once upon a time, today it’s on sites like webduniya where poignant love ebbs and flows. To an overwhelming majority of people who somehow bypassed Messers Wren and Martin, this is certainly a more welcome and dignified mode of keeping in touch.

"We record some 7.5 million page views every month," says webduniya’s Parvinder Gujral, "some 2 million people have e-mail accounts on webduniya," he adds. That figure is expected to grow exponentially. While nasscom has predicted that by 2003 the number of internet users in India will be about 23 million, Vinay Chhajlani who is at the helm of webduniya, believes that only 40 per cent of these will be English-speaking users. Says he, "The internet in India is expected to grow phenomenally in the next few years. If the projections are that 6 per cent of Indians will be net users in a few years, you don’t expect this growth to come from the English-speaking population alone. In fact, less that 6 per cent people in this country understand English. So, I believe that on the net in India as well, very soon the number of people who don’t understand English will far exceed those who can."

This silent popularity of communicating in Indian languages also stems from the fact that most Indians feel that English doesn’t convey their feelings accurately enough. In fact, as one mail on one of the sites indicated, even an abuse is more convincing if it is dished out in the language it was conceived in. The mail (in Hindi) was sent by a woman in New York to an acquaintance who was stalking her. She’d deployed such intricate descriptions of the male anatomy that the Queen’s script would have been found totally wanting.

As Tarun Malvia of mailjol.com points out, "In under three months of starting the mail service, about 55,000 people have registered on the site. In the next nine months we expect the figure to be close to one million." The mail is just part of a growing trend-the bigger attraction is the language chat, a feature only webduniya offers right now. This means that a user can chat in any major Indian language.

The growing number of net connections in numerous B-towns like Kolhapur and Jalgaon have made innovations like e-patra and mailjol truly significant. And there are many on the web whose eyes are clouding over out of the sheer joy of communicating with the beloved (or a foe) in the language they’re comfortable with. This is best expressed by one of the mails a site received: "Thank you. This will be beneficial for many other who are poor in English or dose not know any other language other than their mother tongue. I am praying that you make money because sites like you should continue rendering best services." That, going by the response, they certainly will.