| | | Good morning! | | Many tongues; some forked I have a theory. Many Hindi speakers want everyone else to learn Hindi so that they do not have to learn any other language. It’s a theory that’s actually backed by data – although this is dated because we couldn’t be bothered about conducting the national census. Work on the 2021 Census is yet to begin. But the Language Census of India, 2011 has some interesting data. The so-called Hindi belt is mostly monolingual. For instance, just around 11.45% of Uttar Pradesh’s population is bilingual. The proportion is even lower (10.9%) for Rajasthan, and only marginally better for Madhya Pradesh (13.51%) and Bihar (16.10%). The proportion is 28.3% for Tamil Nadu, although there are other large states that do even better: it is 51% for Maharashtra and 42% for Gujarat. To be sure, the proportion is low in Kerala (24.4%), but 9.5% of the state’s population is trilingual; the language census does not count trilinguals in the bilingual population. The proportion of trilingual people in Uttar Pradesh is only 1.29%. It is around 3.3% in Tamil Nadu. Among large states, Maharashtra does well – 17.5% of its population is trilingual. The Hindi belt fares poorly in terms of both bilingualism and trilingualism as clearly shown in the maps in the Language Atlas of India, 2011 . I am all for people learning languages other than their own – I’d identify English as my primary language and Tamil as the main subsidiary, but I can also speak and read Hindi (and read Sanskrit) – because it facilitates communication. For instance, most of my interactions with ministers and other politicians are in Hindi; my Hindi is better than their English, and most of them do not speak Tamil. I am also all for people learning foreign languages – Chinese, French, Spanish are all languages that can help in a variety of settings (and I do not mean restaurants). Purely based on the government’s own data from the language census, the Hindi belt states have a lot of work to do on the language front. Tamil Nadu, too, should; Maharashtra is a good benchmark (over two-thirds of its population can speak at least two languages). P.S: Given that many blue-collar workers in the southern states now come from the Hindi belt, and given that some of them pick up the local language (it’s a question of survival), it is very likely that the proportion of bilingual population even in the Hindi belt has increased since 2011 – but we will know this for sure only when the national census is carried out. While on the subject of languages, it’s important to acknowledge that the growth of Hindi even in the Hindi belt has come at the cost of local languages, as pointed out by my colleague Roshan Kishore in an article in Mint (when we were both in that newsroom). This is the article Tamil Nadu chief minister MK Stalin referenced (without credit, but I am not complaining) in a long post on X a few weeks ago. | | Glorious Bustards Roshan is worried by the extinction of languages; I obsess over the extinction of species. There are several that run the risk of going extinct in my lifetime, including the White-bellied Heron (less than 250 of the species survive in the wild), and the Great Indian Bustard (the last estimation puts the population at 150 in the wild, but many experts believe the number has already shrunk below 100). The loss of habitat is the main reason for the dwindling numbers of both species; in the case of the GIB, feral dogs and power lines for solar and wind projects are killers too. When a species numbers around 100, even one death is one too many – something that seems to have escaped the attention of the Supreme Court, which, in 2024, spoke loftily of the need to balance the conservation imperative with that to generate green power. Balance is all very well, but not when the extinction of a species is involved. But there’s hope for the GIB – in the form of a captive breeding programme. My colleague Jasjeev Gandhiok recently spent time with some of the bustard foster mothers in Jaisalmer. Together, the 10 foster mothers look after 45 chicks of varying age; some were born of eggs collected from the wild; others were hatched from eggs laid by bustards that were bred in captivity. The next stage is to release the birds in the wild. One of the most successful captive breeding and release programmes of birds concerns another bustard, the MacQueen’s Bustard or the Asian Houbara . This is a programme funded by the Emiratis, and partly born of necessity; Sheikhs like hunting the bird for sport (Pakistan, which is where many spend their winters, has been munificent in allowing such hunting), and its meat is believed to have aphrodisiacal properties. In winter, some of the Houbara also spend time across the border in Kutch (that’s where I have seen them). | | Modern extinctions The Great Auk is the bird that showed the world it was possible for species to become extinct from human-caused reasons; in the case of the bird, it was overhunting. There’s been a recent surge of interest in the bird (perhaps because of the continuing interest in extinction, and how we have, as a species, become very good at causing them). Last year saw the release of Gisli Palsson’s The Last of its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction , and, this week saw the release of Tim Birkhead’s The Great Auk: Its Extraordinary Life, Hideous Death and Mysterious Afterlife. But the finest book on extinction I have read in recent months is a 1954 one, The Last of the Curlews , a work of fiction by Fred Bodsworth on the Eskimo Curlew, whose numbers were dwindling even back when he wrote the book, and which has not been sighted since 1987. It’s a short book, beautifully written, and tinged with the kind of sadness that one rarely encounters in fiction (but which is common in real life). There are similar bird mysteries in India – some unsolved – and interested readers may find it worthwhile to check out The Search for India’s Rarest Birds , edited by Anita Mani (my wife) and Shashank Dalvi. | | The windmills of Beed It turns out that GIBs aren’t the only casualty of renewable energy projects; in interior Maharashtra, people are. Renewable power plants – like anything else – require land, and in India, anything that involves land is messy, complex, and political . It is also sometimes violent, as the late-2024 murder of a popular village headman in Beed, Santosh Deshmukh, showed. It’s a murder that’s also highlighted the deepening divide between the Marathas and the other backward classes (OBCs) in the state. The controversy has already claimed the job of an OBC minister in the Maharashtra cabinet. And it doesn’t look like it is going to go away soon. | | Death and archives The Grateful Dead are the gift that keep on giving. 30 years after the band ceased to exist in its original form (Jerry Garcia died in 1995), they are issuing 60 hours of mostly unreleased music from 20 shows played between 1969 and 1994, in a 60-CD box set, Enjoying the Ride . That’s around 450 songs, according to a report. There’s also going to be an abridged six-LP set, The Music Never Stopped , which picks songs from the 20 concerts. Three of the songs were released on streaming platforms this week, including a very fine 1984 rendition of Scarlet Begonias . Once a Deadhead… | | What’s your poison? If you are Indian, it’s likely whisky or beer. Of the 6.2 billion litres of liquor Indians drank in 2022 (the latest year for which data is available), 2.7 billion litres were beer and 2.1 billion litres whisky. Much of this is locally made ; the country imported only 128 million litres of liquor in 2022-23, around 2.1% of the total consumption. A long-term trend study (almost a decade) shows that bourbon imports accounted for just 3.3% of total liquor imports in this period. Clearly, the high tariff (150%, now reduced to 100%) on bourbon wasn’t the only thing holding people back . | | Tempus Fugit Overwhelmed? Feel tired all the time? Yes? Want to know why? Kashyap Kompella has a plausible explanation in this week’s Wknd: “There’s a reason you feel tired or overwhelmed so much of the time. There simply isn’t enough time or opportunity to do all the things we have now been primed to “want” to do. A nagging feeling of inadequacy then creeps in. There is the sense, at least occasionally, that one is not being the best version of oneself, in one’s various roles (parent, partner, co-worker, caregiver). How did we begin to hurtle this much?” How, indeed, and what can you do to break free? Is the secret less networking? My colleague Natasha Rego writes that “we are in contact with more people today – conducting more social interactions and processing more information, on average – than would have been thought possible, through most of human history”. The big question, she adds, is: “How does this play into our sense of being overwhelmed?” She spoke to Robin Dunbar, the British anthropologist who found a correlation between primate brain size and size of social group, and, based on this, posited in the 1990s that humans can, on average, maintain about 150 stable, meaningful relationships at a time. | | | | Were you forwarded this email? Did you stumble upon it online? Sign up here. | | | | | | Get the Hindustan Times app and read premium stories | | | | | | View in Browser | Privacy Policy | Contact us You received this email because you signed up for HT Newsletters or because it is included in your subscription. Copyright © HT Digital Streams. All Rights Reserved | | | | |
