“Hi, would you like to come and see our flick”
An innocuous line, you would think, but one which got K fuming I could see the fumes coming out of her ear.
“That stupid child doesn’t know how to handle the client.” Said K, “ I should sack him and get a secretary’ she added.
“Kya Hua ?” I asked. And she let loose a litany of gaali’s gaalis. (Thank you shefaly )
Her fully qualified MBA MT (management trainee) had written a mail to their company’s leading client asking them if they wanted to invest monies in their film after watching it – hence the line “would you like to come and see our flick”. K has now issued a directive that no mail will leave the company to a client unless vetted by her. She is also wondering whether to replace her well paid MBA with a secretary who will take dictation and type out a letter.
This is not the first time I have heard that. My client RR asked me to find him an intern. I teach – and interact with students in the BMM programme run by the University of Mumbai. But, RR is from my father’s generation; a perfectionist who will not put up with shoddy work – and I have been hesitant to recommend people to him. Rightly So.
He called me up two days ago.
“I need a new EA” he boomed.
“What happened to the old one” I asked.
“Kya bolon, don’t you teach them how to send and receive mails” – he asked ?. His principals are in the USA and they don’t appreciate mails that go “v hv recd yr mail. Ta”
And, if you think that I am exaggerating, here’s a letter I received from a student:
“Hello mam ther’s a personal query nt on behalf of clas. V wanted to know if v can reduce d number of ad agencies bt tak many ads as examples. Like from 1 ad agency we can give 3-4 examples. Will that be fine? Waiting 4 ur reply.”
You don’t even want to know my response. There is only one line that can be used to explain what happens when I read stuff like this – “mera dimag satakta hai ”
I have been in the media for 15 years, and each subsequent year – I lose a bit of my vocabulary and more of my grammar. And, each year I see the level of language declining.
Part of the problem is SMS and the fact that if I send a message such as “whr r u” – most people will understand. However, when I send that kind of a message as a part of a formal letter, then it looks shoddy. The other part of the problem is that in a world dominated by the visual medium – reading skills are non existent. Therefore, writing skills become more problematic. If you haven’t read enough – and don’t know good style from bad – then its’ not really your fault. It’s the problem of a system that brings up students – from the KG level to be functionally illiterate .So maybe two things that people ought to inculcate to write better is to turn on the dictionary function on their mobiles and write full sentences – and the other is to read. Also, check on the net for letter formats – the net is not just about hanging out, it has a fair bit of useful information.
Most colleges in this city don’t stress on language skills or on syntax. They don’t want the risk of someone taking them to court for failing their exams. Our instructions are do not cut marks for poor language skills. But remember that those who make the rules have full time jobs, very often they are confirmed employees of the state with a pension. You aren’t. Nor am I 🙂
The world is not Orkut. Nor is it Facebook. In this world people don’t poke you. They fire you.. And, the worse your language skills, the greater the chances of you not getting ahead.
The problem isn’t the employee — it’s the employer who was stupid enough to hire this dumbass. I do not know why personal failure in judgment is passed on as a collective failure of another generation.
Worse, some seem to buy that!
it’s both. they end up picking the best of a bad lot. And, with uninhibited litigation in place – standards of education fall.
The point isn’t to cater to people with the least skills. The aim of education is to ensure that everyone’s skills are raised up .
Recently Mumbai University revised its BMM curriculum for the 1st years. They have 10 authors to be covered in a 4 month terms. Authors like Camus, Garcia Marquez etal. When colleges protested – the University revised their guidelines – teach about the authors not the books. What’s the point ?
But, in their greed to get more students on the unaided courses, the University is diluting standards – and for most 1st generation college goers and their parents it is a bad scene. Worthless pieces of paper on which the degree is printed 🙁
Why Camus or Garcia Marquez would be part of BMM is something I do not understand. In fact, why these classics would be be part of any “prescribed” curriculum is beyond me. Aren’t these for summer reading?
that is because they have a paper called “introduction to English literature” 🙁
but, they don’t teach literature – they teach authors !!!!!!
I don’t think the SMS issue flies any more. Most phones have had T9 for years and it is faster to type ‘where are you’ than ‘wr r u’ or whatever.. It is just sloppiness and, in my opinion, disrespect for the reader.
sloppiness yes. but, also they don’t know the difference.
We all studied and there was a discipline and a respect for the process – now there isn’t.
People aren’t taught these skills – in either school or college. it seems so unfair. The promise of education that doesn’t deliver 🙁
I don’t think this is a failure on the part of the employer. People are hired based on CVs and interviews and not by sampling their email writing skills.
The unfortunate thing is that people (not a particular generation) do not seem to understand the need for separation between formal and casual conversation. This is not limited just to shortening “We” to “V” or “Could” to “Cud”, etc. But it also equally applies to using colloquial tone in formal business communication.
Hi Sameer
maybe there could be a two pronged interview – written and oral. pick the best.
It is not just about how flashy people are – a lot of work is still document driven .
in my business – great to make a sales call – but that sales call has to be followed up with a written proposal !!
Bravo! I am so grateful, relieved and happy to read this post! For several years now there’s this sinking feeling crawling up on me: that I am one of the few language dinosaurs still around but facing imminent extinction. While I’m not from your parents’ generation 🙂 and not an old-fashioned perfectionist, I do wince when I read stuff written in what I call ‘SMS-ese’. Assuming that I manage to read the whole thing at all – quite often I give up mid-way and start yelling at whoever wrote it (if they’re within shouting distance) or write a scathing note back to them (if they’re not) asking them to learn to communicate in plain English.
Your diagnosis is quite accurate, I think, except I would add one more dimension to the attempt to figure out why this is happening. Which is basically peer pressure and the need to be accepted. We’ve all done a lot of silly things in our younger years just to look cool, “with-it” and hang with the right crowd. Well, most of us did, if not all, and so it continues with every generation. With youngsters today, one of the cool things to do is to write in SMS-ese, even if they don’t have a constraint of 160 char. and are able to spell words fully, construct whole sentences and compose entire paragraphs. For them, it is a generation thing. As my daughter says – I would end up sounding like you!
i am not my parent’s generation either 🙂 but i wince a lot when I read stuff that is incomprehensible. I get a lot of it in class -where I can scream, and also at the University where I can’t 🙁
My blog is informal & conversational – my grammar and language are geared towards that. My proposals on the other hand are formal. And, stories have their own structure.
I believe that language itself evolves. I was telling my students, just this morning, that Shakespeare in his time was considered lowbrow, crass and catering to the Lowest Common Denominator. He would be apalled to see his plays in the same language – even now. The archaic form serves as a barrier to understanding.
I personally find the language in Govt. of Maharashtra and India documents to be confusing & inaccessible 🙁 i wish legal language can be simplified.
But simplified does not mean dumbed down.
Your daughter will realise – the market she works in, will impose its own discipline. She will find that she can’t write a story in SMS language -it will get bounced by the channel 🙂 she may not sound like you 🙂 but she will come close – and her children will chide her for being very formal in her language skills 🙂
Informal/conversational is good. Most older English-speaking Indians write a stilted bureaucratic English, and most younger Indians write some SMS-type language. You never read a newspaper article that makes you smile for its language alone, as you may in foreign newspapers.
But, on those lines: may I nitpick at your sprinkling emoticons all over the place? Or is there a hidden meta-joke in that? I use them too (just as I use occasional abbreviations like BTW), but the emotion should be evident in the language — and following an offensive statement by a smiley (as many people do) doesn’t make it less offensive.
for me, the blog is a conversation – and what i end up doing is put in a smile, where i would smile, and a scowl when i would scowl !
I didn’t figure when the colon and bracket got replaced with the emoticon gifs – shall try and curb that habit !!
HyperActiveX, there’re still quite a few language dinosaurs left in this world, myself included. And Rahul, the T9 enabled ones we find today come with predefined ur’s and gr8’s – making their “adaptable T9” more of a vice.
And please don’t mind my pointing it out: I think your last line should be “the worse your language skills, the greater the chances of your not getting ahead.”
Now, that’s reassuring! Evolution is inevitable, and actually, welcome. Adaptation is good thing. Decay is not.
Cheers!
hi vig
welcome to this blog.
the tribe of dinosaurs increases .
Glad to be inducted! 😀
Sameer,
If as an employer one is unable to judge whether the person being hired can communicate reasonably with a client, that person deserves worse failure. There is a reason CEOs and top management get paid buckets of cash.
And you hire going by CVs? Good luck!
Nilu,
You don’t need a CEO to define language skills as a key criterion for a position. The employer has other things to consider as well. That doesn’t take away from the issue that there is a paucity of interns and fresh graduates who are able to string a sentence together without MS Word correcting them. Not that MS Word is correct all the time, though.
In the spirit of the post, I am duty-bound to point out that one does not let loose “a litany of gaali’s” but “a litany of gaalis”. The apostrophe is not pluralisation, it is the possessive case.
Likewise you are not your “parent’s generation” but your “parents’ generation”. Mentioning just one parent? Why discriminate? 😉
PS: Thanks for writing about my pet peeve. As you know from my now-behind-a-wall blog, I wrote about this often and I still use bad usage as a filter to file people under “illiterate”. Sad but true. And did you really say ‘people should read’. Are you the only person who missed the news about Morgan Stanley teenage intern’s insights? They do not read anything that is several pages in length. Don’t hold your breath.
LOL 🙂 made one of hte changes :
couldn’t help it – earlier didn’t have a problem with kids writing short form.
i still don’t. but, they have to be
However, I have realised that it goes against them at the workplace – so have tightened the screws .
The CEO analogy was what it was. An analogy.
Hmm..i dont like SMS-ese either, but just makes me wonder if that is how the language is going to evolve..if it does evolve that way maybe the accused in this post are just pioneers…we can lament the fact that we don’t like it,, it is difficult to read etc..but then it may be the way of the future.
As I said in an earlier response to this post – Evolution is inevitable, and actually, welcome. Adaptation is good thing. Decay is not.
Wake up all you oldie, perfectionist, pompous, linguistically concerned people, times(Including TOI) have changed. Allow me to be a prognosticator – your next generation is going to speak, read, write and live the so called SMS language whether you and I like it or not. It’s we (or us?) who are living in the Colonial-Shakespearian-Victorian-clergical-clerical English the problem, not the young men and women in discussion here who just use language as a means to communicate more efficiently and faster and not something to test, prove their linguistic abilities. We just cannot punish them for that, because the future is theirs.
Gargi…more than the language it is the attitude and peer pressure. It is a classic British/American approach conflict…while we still carry shades of British language, which is correct grammar, colon, hyphen et al. Remember Nirad C Chaudhury?
We have exposed our next generation towards American influence…therefore these ya…grt…
There are youngsters with values…social, professional, lingual, relational…though numbers are fast receding…Hope I make sense to literary geniuses 🙂
Mek dem rite in der own mother tongue n pblm vill b solved! der is no shortcut in other languages, is der! i tell ya! it wud cause d pblm if der mother tongue iz text language, tho’. but textz iz old skool now. cos, i believe, twitter has replaced textz. no?
If you do not understand the above few lines, then you can give your employee to translate that for you. 😀
I used to write/draft perfectlly and with no grammatical mistakes. habit developed in school by following Wren & Martin and reading TOI from first to last page-including Tendors and Legal Notices. But once I have started e mailing and Blogging. MSN has spoiled me.I have become careless with spelling and grammer. Whatever i(TOI) write can be changed by just a click ! my mistakes are underlined and I have chance to correct them by just clicking on ‘suggestion’. Dont forget, Hinglish and constructing a sentence in varnacular method is creeping in. Asking a quastion has changed, hasnt it? Tell no !!–PK
( No correction done)
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I enthusiastically agree! I cannot stand all that short form stuff. How hard is it to write like you’re an intelligent person? You obviously KNOW how to properly form a sentence…
I agree with you folks but still how can laguage can be controlled by few grammer rules and dictionary ?