Similarly, there is an unanswerable case for saying "Hyderabad is the sangam of North and South Indian cultures," "sangam" meaning confluence. Also "Mr. X was so disgusted with the emerging picture of a free India that he early in life decided to go on political sanyas."

"He is a 420" in the same sense of being a cheat, too, is perfectly understandable, 420 being the section in the Indian Penal Code that deals with the offence of cheating.

Language is a means of communicating thoughts and so long as it is able to perform this prime function, it stands vindicated, whatever the purists may say.

"Wanted hawai sundaris" (air hostesses) would elicit a wider response for Air India than what it does today. It has an aura all its own not possessed by the term in English. "Cousin brother" and "cousin sister" are very commonly used in India, though there are no such compound words in English. But one should think that these two words would be understood by people in all English-speaking countries and not merely by English-speaking Indians. In fact, they deserve to be incorporated in all standard English dictionaries, because they are more connotative than "cousin" only.

A sentence like "every Tom, Dick and Harry in India thinks that he is fit to become the prime minister of the country" would not make any impact in our country because the idiom is unknown to many. Some time ago, a Hyderabad English daily wrote "It is not every Ellayya, Mallayya and Pullayya who can aspire to become the chief minister of Andhra Pradesh." The impact of the idiom was felt by the newspaper’s readers, the three being very common names in the State. In Hindi, it would be "every Dwivedi, Trivedi and Chaturvedi." In purely Indian contexts, such expressions are allowable.

There is no copyright to ideas or language as such. If English today is almost a worldwide language, it is not because of the English but because of the Americans who popularised it not only in Western Europe but also in Japan. At the same time, speech habits die hard and we find variations in English spoken in different countries. The house journal of a well-known multinational recently carried an amazing story of how misunderstandings could arise by the same English word being understood differently by nationals of different countries. A German met an English lady when it was raining heavily, which in itself is a source of unsophisticated delight to the person to whom a heavy downpour is a rare phenomenon. He asked her in all innocence: "Are you feeling gay?" A scowl on her face manifested her resentment, because in England "gay" has now acquired an overtone of homosexual preference. From one faux pas to another, when he asked her: "Are you feeling hot?" The reference was to the weather but she understood him as asking her "Are you feeling sexy?" Her face turned
crimson.

In the sphere of idioms, there is the greatest scope for the development of Indian English. Indian English is not Hinglish if by that is meant a hybrid language in which there is an indiscriminate mixing of English and Hindi grammar, syntax and idioms. It means a language in which the language is indigenised by a judicious grafting of Hindi and other Indian language words and idioms of the broad generality of English vocabulary and gramma.

A large number of Sanskrit and Hindi words have been included in the English language such as raj, maya, avatar, nirvana and jungle. One of the most expressive idioms in English is "law of the jungle" meaning "might is right". The keyword here is the Hindi word "jungle" which is used in preference to the English word "forest." The word "pundit" is widely used now to describe an expert. "Satyagraha" and "hartal" have already found their way into the English dictionary and it is only a matter of time before words like "gherao," "bandhs" and "bewaqoof" are also absorbed.

Indian film magazines and some particular TV programmes are contributing a lot to the evolution of an Indian English by freely employing words and phrases like filmi masala, dum (derring-do) and chamcha (sycophant). Though they write in a flamboyant style, they have made the language folksy too, by adding a fair sprinkling of Indian words, giving a distinctly Indian flavour to their writings "Arre yaar" (friend) while addressing someone would be perfectly good Indian English. "Do it now, otherwise there will be a lot of lafda later" and "Ram rajya" and "Ravana rajya" are some other words that could be well employed in Indian English with telling effect.