What made their work possible? That crucial industry which seeds creativity at different levels whether scientific, technical, artistic or literary: translation.The social sciences and humanities were also recognized at that meeting but-aiyoh-not a single newspaper reported what those winners said.

Every one of them was building on knowledge systems that had crossed the blood-brain barriers of language centuries ago. Every one of the six winners born and raised in different parts of the world spoke in English. In early 2019, there was a celebration and explanation of scientists and their work which seemed to prove that human vocabulary had expanded to include the exploration of wormholes and galaxies as well as the worlds inside the cell, the building block of life itself. Eckhart Tolle wrote вЂњWords reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp which isnвЂ™t very much.вЂќ True? All those in favour-letвЂ™s have a show of hands. Never entirely happy with your bank-balance of words, always looking to be further enriched with more words, always wondering what others are reading, checking the covers of fellow passengersвЂ™ books on trains and flights and peering discreetly at a strangerвЂ™s Kindle page. WellвЂ¦if you are reading this, youвЂ™re a word-cruncher. Cover of the Malayalam original of Kocharethi For instance, last week a friend messaged me, вЂњHereвЂ™s a phrase which has been running around in my head: вЂњhomesick for sadnessвЂќ. The writer plucks a single string which resonates through her reader for a long time-sometimes as we can all personally aver-his whole life.

We do not possess the secret jewel of imagination writers have but we can share their creations and feel what they felt when they wrote their books. They are not particularly sociable because they live intensely in their minds and see the rest of life as an interruption. Though they appear distant and glamorous to us, in reality, many writers are sad, lonely and misunderstood. With word waves rising and striking the shore of the Indian mind ceaselessly, the many languages of our country lie before us like an ocean of experience all shaped and provided by fellow Indians: ingenious, exhilarating, furiously energetic, and hurling powerful weapons like satire and humour to counter cultural terrorism. Recalling how the writer Narayan had to translateВ ( to himself) his Malayarayar dialect into Malayalam while writing his first novel Kocharethi (1998)and reading about Deccani/Dakhni ( a mix of Persian, Old Urdu, Dehlavi, Kannada, Marathi and Telugu) I reflected wryly on our neat packaging of linguistic regions and regional languages whereas the truth is that they are all and each, impressively, a grand kaleidoscope of many variants. Could Udaya help him? The rest of the booklet explains why there is no single language called вЂњIndianвЂќ. But he, the sender of the email, wanted to study вЂњIndianвЂќ.

The writer said that he knew friends who had studied Korean, Russian and Chinese. Not that Tamizh-ttaayi with a head start of 2000 years was in the least disturbed.ДЄround about the same time, in the opening paragraph of Udaya Narayan SinghвЂ™s India Writes (2006) he described an email from Germany. He was perfectly content-indeed smug-about placing the subcontinentвЂ™s oldest language outside DelhiвЂ™s club of Hindi-Punjabi and Urdu. Khushwant Singh once told Abdul Kalam that he knew only two words in Tamizh: aiyoh and vanakam. вЂњWriting is the painting of the mind.вЂќ (advertisement for pencils by Mitzubishi)

Telugu to kannada books