A Curious Linguistic Coincidence

Japanese is really a nice language to learn. Not only that it will open a window to the hearts of one of the world’s most hard working people, and also it convinces you of the constancy and invariability of human needs of communication. Man is the same everywhere. If you allow for the sophistication brought about by technology, you’d also realize that he is the same, over the ages. But this does not deny that etiquette and manners had tremendously improved as time progressed. We live in a far better place than our ancestors did and our descendants will obviously live a happier and better life. What caused this? Technology did it, as I will explain.

Noble ideals like altruism, charity, social help and support of the weak do not come about naturally. Evolution is all about survival ensured through success in the competition for limited resources. But explicit competition over food or mates is frowned upon in modern society. So what should be the alternative? Increase the resources so that there is no need to compete that would sometimes end up in the death of one of the rivals. You willingly hand over the first cup of tea in restaurant to your friend with the full assurance that another cup will follow soon. If that self-confidence is lacking, and you grab the first cup, you’d end up as an anti-social person in a rich, modern society, whereas you will be just another normal guy in a primitive society where food is scarce. In essence, we are able to live happily in a socially responsible way only because we had had technology with us for the last 10,000 years or so. In short, we owe our morality and principles to technology.

But that was not the observation I had originally planned to make. How easily one is swerved off the track! I was mentioning the Japanese language based on a brief exposure to it lasting hardly four months in 1999, fourteen years ago. We learned the alphabet in Katakana script which is sound-based, rather than the impossibly difficult Hiragana script which was pictogram-based. The alphabet is similar sounding to its Indian counterparts which is having the same sounds, but in different scripts. We found it much easier to learn the pronunciation of Japanese terms by transliterating it in Indian scripts rather than in English. However, there was a major difference between Indian and Japanese languages. There is no sound of ‘la’ in Japanese. They replace it with ‘ra’. This ends up in awkward rendition of English words like ‘hotel’ which is voiced as ‘hoteru’. Similarly, ‘link’ becomes ‘rink’. This had caused much amusement back then when pronouncing the participants’ names which contained the sound ‘l’.

 

A comparison between Katakana and Brahmi scripts

What I find now is that the transposition of ‘r’ and ‘l’ is not unique to Japanese. In fact, it was practiced in India itself, though removed 2200 years back in time to the Mauryan period. Here, the reverse happened, that is, ‘la’ is used in place of ‘ra’. Emperor Ashoka’s inscriptions in rock and pillar edicts are our main sources of epigraphic information about this period. We see two instances of ‘l’ replacing ‘r’. Ashoka’s Bhabra Edict contains the words, “piyadassi laja magadhe” (Priyadarshi, Raja of Magadha), while inscriptions of Dasaratha, Ashoka’s successor, on the caves in Nagarjuni Hills includes the words “dasalathena devanampiyena anantaliyam abhisitena” (given by Dasaratha soon after he was crowned by Ashoka). The language is Prakrit which was a vernacular dialect of Sanskrit. The script is Brahmi, which is widely assumed to be the forerunner of many scripts in south and south-east Asian languages. Who knows, there might have been a connection to Japan as well. A curious coincidence in deed.

Vigilance Meet

Attended a meeting of the Vigilance Study Circle, Kerala at the city office of BPCL at Kundannur. The study circle conducts its meetings often, and sometimes people like me get nominated to attend a program which is as taxing on patience as it is in vain to serve any useful purpose.

The program began with an address by the Chief Vigilance Officer of Cochin Ship Yard who astonished the audience with a suave confession that he does not understand a thing about ships or of building one. It seemed he stopped just short of continuing, “And I don’t care a damn”! So, this man, who doesn’t know anything about how the company earns its money to pay the workers which includes himself, is positioned in such a high point on the ladder to decide if or when his colleagues had gone wrong. Vigilance organizations are mainly concerned with four aspects of malpractice, namely,

a)    Violation of procedure

b)    Illegal gratification

c)    Both (a) and (b)

d)    Illegal gratification but with no violation of procedure (as in government offices)

Those people from the technical community who are burdened with the unenviable task of completion of deadlines in a project know that violation of procedure is one evil they must learn to live with, of course, without any illegal gratification. If such officials like the above vigilance officer lead the watch hounds, how could they even hope to get a sympathetic ear to explain their conduct? It must be repeated here that there is no counter argument to the notion that any illegal gratification must be strictly punished.

The central item on the agenda was a talk given by Shri. P C Cyriac, IAS (Retd) who was the Commissioner of Commercial Taxes in Tamil Nadu and a former collector of Madurai district. I must concede that all of his anecdotes not related to vigilance were interesting and made the talk lively for a few flickering moments! But it soon became apparent from his own words, that he never stood bolt upright against the corrupt. His actions always seemed to be to deny the chances for wrongdoers to take bribe rather than imposing punitive action against the venal. In fact, he cited an example which was unfortunate for his argument. He narrated an innovation he implemented in the tax department of Tamil Nadu. Shop owners were invariably required to submit their account books before the assessing officers for verification while presenting annual statements. Naturally, this was an ideal hunting ground for the corrupt officials to fleece the vendors. And, what did Cyriac do? He put forward a stipulation that people having a turnover of less than Rs. 1 crore (which at that time comprised 90% of the dealers) need not submit their books for verification at the time of presenting statements. The tax department then checked in detail 20% of the people selected at random. He claimed that his exercise resulted in an increase of 50% in the revenue. Of course it might have, but what about the corruption which might invariably have accompanied it? Instead of standing firm against the unscrupulous, he simply sought to avoid the occasion for profiteering by denying an opportunity for the dealer and officer to see face to face. It is definitely true that the officers would have more than made good what they have lost, on the hapless 20% allotted to them for verification!

The food was good, particularly the tea. The most difficult part of decision making was to determine which items should be left on the plate as a matter of good manners. Lunch was also sumptuous, but not of the high caliber expected from the ilk of BPCL. The hosts were generous in supplying a very good ‘Add Gel’ pen too. But the pen was blue, and for me, handling a blue pen is like having a piece of bacon in the hands of a strict vegetarian. The meet ended at 2 pm leaving many people including me wondering why we were invited to a seminar which was not in the least relevant for our work.