On the contrary: Doublespeak Meet namma spinmeisters

As a nation, we are awash in doublespeak. Forget about calling a spade a spade, we lack the basic ability to distinguish between left and right as any visitor who has been foolish enough to ask for directions to Lalbagh will readily testify. Seniors advise watching the guide's hands, which involuntarily point in the correct direction, like a hawk, while ignoring the verbal clues. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, we have a nodding acquaintance with the truth; clearly the ghost of Macaulay is back to haunt us.

The other day I was ascending the new footbridge on Kasturba Road when this elegantly worded signboard caught my eye: "Parents with children below 14 are requested to take care of there(sic) childrens while climbing footbridge. We are not responsible for any discrepancies. By Order, Commissioner BBMP."Well call me pernickety, but I think this callous attitude stems from a fundamentally rotten core. When it is standard operating practice to paper over the cracks (pun intended) with bubblegum, dump garbage in disused quarries or build roads with the durability of an eggshell, the next logical step is to refer to a child who is the victim of sloppy engineering as a "discrepancy."

The 2018-19 BBMP budget is 9300 cr and the discrepancy on just one item, SWM, is to the tune of 66 cr; for lakes the discrepancy is roughly 50 cr. On RRE (road related expenditure) the receipts are 25 cr while the payments are a whopping 145 cr. I am not picking these numbers out of a hat; they are diligently sourced from the BBMP's website established at the princely sum of God knows how many discrepancies? When confusion replaces clarity, those who speak with forked tongue rule the roost, while the demons of doublespeak break out the champagne. As Ted Knight from whom I have liberally "borrowed" says, "It's so much easier to push people toward the brink when the stop signs are edited to say "whatever." As any fule kno, the amber light here is a signal for every moron to lean on his horn.

While Messrs Smith, Warner & Bancroft are having a ball tampering with yellow cloths, the spinmeisters at the BBMP weave a tangled web of deceit with "language which makes the bad seem good, the negative seem positive, the unpleasant seem unattractive, or at least tolerable," to paraphrase William Lutz, author of "The New Doublespeak." Try and imagine the plight of some unfortunate couple with three "maggus" who have rashly strayed onto the footbridge and descend on the Cubbon Park side only to discover they are one "maggu" short. "Kanna, where is Raghava?" the irate husband may have said, since men, as we know, are as prone to carelessness as they are to shift the blame.

"Yennre, you only were holding his hand," will be the missus's lightning down-the-line return of serve while the hapless Raghava languishes in the elevator. "I say, I thought you were having three issues. What happened to Raghava," a solicitous neighbor may have ventured to ask when they returned to Sampangiramnagar from their ill-fated excursion. "Aiyyo, devare, what to tell I say? We have suffered one number discrepancy," is what the unfortunate father will probably say.

"Tolerance," said G.K. Chesterton "is the virtue of the man without convictions." Sadly our political leaders who wield "tolerance" like a commissar's bloody axe do not lack convictions; they just want to punish anyone who does not share theirs. Forget "discrepancies" for a moment; while we long for halfway decent infrastructure, we are fobbed off with this circus of insanity and cowardice where "backward is forward" and forward is backward. As we watch word after word twisted into doublespeak by corrupt elites, one is reminded of George Orwell's quote: "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

How much doublespeak can one day hold?
Let's follow the average Bengalurean through his day as the dung of doublespeak is thrown at him from all sides:

Appana tunes in to his favorite FM station for a traffic update:"moderately heavy at the Silk Board Junction, expect delays of up-to an hour with frothing at Bellandur Lake." He is reminded of Donald Rumsfeld with his "known unknowns", his hopes that the "incursion" will go quickly, with "weapons systems" achieving "shock and awe "during their first "visit" with miniscule "collateral damage" caused by "incontinent ordnance."

At work he has lunch in the cafeteria with his colleagues where he discovers his company is implementing "operational excellence" in which at least 33% of the employees will be "involuntarily separated from the payroll." Management is "refocusing the company's "skill sets" with "work reengineering" and "proactive downsizing."At least he knows what to say on his resume: "I was part of an elite group selected to participate in the 'voluntary resignation programme."