A couple of days ago, I came across a facebook group telling people to get an atlas if they can’t recognise country names. And, I remembered my first experiences in France. The first time I told someone outside of Sciences Po that I was from India was at the residence where I live. This guy insisted on starting a conversation with me when I was doing my laundry. Wanting to be polite, I replied to his question on my nationality by saying I was Indian. And voila! He says, “Ah! Tu es indienne? Donc, tu parles indien?” To translate, asked me if I spoke Indian. It made me want to turn around and tell him to be a little more precise. Which one of the 21 official languages and more than 500 (I may be wrong here) unofficial ones is Indian? I refrained from unleashing my sarcasm on the unsuspecting character and decided to be polite. I explained that there were more languages in India than in the whole of Europe put together. Which one did he mean? To that he replies, with a tone of great sincerety, “But, all of them must be comprehensible to everyone right?”

Uh oh…problem here. Tell me, is French comprehensible to someone who speaks only Romanian? Or English to someone who speaks Norwegian exclusively? Then how the hell does he expect a native Bengali to understand Tamil? I dismissed the incident as a freak accident of fate. But no, I had overestimated the intelligence of some people in this place. Since then, I have met people who have asked me the same dumb questions. “Is there internet in India? Do you speak English? Do you have electricity?” Haven’t they heard of India ever? Haven’t they followed the furore that outsourcing created? Have they not ever heard of Amartya Sen? Do you have any idea how many Indians work at Microsoft? Do they even know that when they call Dell to troubleshoot your computer, they are probably talking to an Indian named Maragathavalli with the nickame Maggie, or one named Sambasivam a.k.a Sam?

For the last time guys, I am not from the tip of the world. I come from a country that is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. It is many times bigger than France or Germany and is home to one-sixth of humanity. And also for the last time, a language called Indian does not exist. It is Hindi, Tamil, Kannada, Bengali, Gujarati or even Tulu, but not Indian. Get it right! Indian is a nationality, not a language!

These are, as the title suggests, the confessions of an obsessed freak. I am totally and completely fed up of people using the words then and than interchangeably. I am also fed up of people forgetting that good is an adjective, and well is an adverb. One cannot do good in studies. He/she can only do well. Is it really that difficult to remember some basic rules of English grammar? I am a stickler for good grammar. So, shoot me! The French would not take kindly to someone speaking their language badly. They will and do correct glaring mistakes in language. While I acknowledge that writing in e-mail lingo is both quicker and easier, there must be some ground rules on writing in serious columns and blogs. I agree that your blog is your own personal way of saying what you feel like. But, that doesn’t mean you render yourself totally incomprehensible to the unsuspecting reader who stumbles on your home page.

I was looking for some maps on the Indian Ocean region a few days ago and I stumbled on a blog that supplied great maps, but was written in atrociously ungrammatical English. I was curious enough to look up the name and location of the owner of the site on www.dnsstuff.com. And voila! I find that the site is owned by someone in California, United States. My reasoning that it must be a work of a person who was not a native speaker went flying out of the window. This business makes me think that George Bernard Shaw was right when he lamented the state of the English language in the play Pygmalion. Why can’t people just take the effort to learn the language they use every day?