I was a collegian when I first read it. And it was quite a while before my eyes swam back into the safety of their sockets. The dense prose like the delirious ranting of a lunatic was purported to have been by a famous orator while revealing the secret of his success. This is how it went, verbatim: "In promulgating your esoteric cogitations and articulating your superficial, sentimental and psychological observations, beware of platitudinous ponderosity. Let your extemporaneous incantations and unpremeditated expatiations have intelligibility and veracious veracity without any rodomontade or thrasonical bombast. Sedulously, avoid all polysyllabic profundity, pestiferous profanity, pusillanimous vacuity and similar transgressions. "In other words, speak precisely, truthfully and clearly. Above all, avoid big words!" I was then in that adolescent stage when the birds and bees hold you enraptured, but this convoluted composition stopped me in my tracks, much like that BSc bio dame. Years later I still remember it, shows how firmly it gripped me and what an uncanny ability I have to file away garbage in my primitive brain. That was the first conscious clash I had with complex matters, which usually come disguised as jargon. Over the years, I've realised that moronic nonsense has a peculiar affinity for me. I share with it the kind of relationship you have with a burdensome lover you are trying to shake off, and failing miserably. When my paltry pocket money could no longer stand up to my ever-mounting college expenses -- girlfriends, cigarettes, films, bike-fuel -- I took up a part-time job at an advertising agency. It sure firmed up the finances, but exposed me to a dreadful lot of idiotic idioms. By the time I realised that 'art work' wasn't something Picasso excelled at, and that a 'copy writer' and a guy caught cheating at the exams were very different, I was faced with a whole new set of balderdash. A 'visualiser', it turned out, was not a visionary, an 'account executive' wasn't a glorified accountant, and an 'account' was actually a client. We Bhates come from strong stock, given to firmly putting our foot down when things begin to get out of hand. So, before more of such baloney could engulf me, I leapt for the exit. In any case, by then my expenditure had taken a giant leap forward: girlfriends, as you would agree, are far more expensive than wives. This time around, it was a part-time affair -- which was later to turn into a full-blown fixation -- with journalism. But Pain takes no holidays, as I did between the two jobs, and was lurking in the newsroom to pounce on me. Soon it was clear that the language spoken thereabouts was Greek: fluent, flawless Greek. The first thing I encountered was 'hard copy'. I gulped, thinking it was going to be a really tough assignment. Then came 'wire service' and made me wonder why the blazes did one need an electrician to gather news. 'Pasting' was another term that got my goat: I mean, it's one thing being ready to slog your butt off and quite another to submit to being beaten up. Luckily, 'pasting' turned out to be as innocuous an exercise as the use of familiar glue to keep things from parting company. That, nonetheless, wasn't the end of my conflict with Jargon. There was more: flyer, lead, leader, op-ed, compositor, proof... 'Bottomspread' certainly wasn't what you'd think it is. All this left me cross-eyed. My expenses graph too shot up, for I'd begun to smoke like a chimney. But, possessed of the incredible ability to grasp the obvious, I soon got the hang of things. Student days were soon over and the senior Bhates nipped my budding romance with the media in the bud. "A management graduate has to get a 'proper' job," my rather formidable clan notified me. So, a campus interview and a couple of months later, I found myself on the rolls of a courier company. It was a drastic change in terms of the nature of employment. The idiom, however, remained well nigh the same. A 'POD' wasn't something you peeled to get at the peas inside but something that the customer kept hollering and calling you names for. Then CBPs, QTPs, CSs, DMRs, and the rest of the rearranged alphabet kept the pulse rate going like a racing car. A 'manifest', I discovered, was not a spook that makes an unannounced appearance in the neighbourhood of your bed, but a log of parcels sent or received. I knew more such missiles would travel in my direction, so I ditched the messenger service. The medium is the message, I consoled myself, limping back into the arms of my object of desire: the Press. But, by some quirk of fate, this time my stint was to be with financial journalism. Jargon mugged me with rare ferocity. I ran into a bulwark of abstruse terminology from day one. 'Amortisation' seemed awfully morbid, while 'evergreening of NPAs' left me green about the gills. 'Securitisation', however, I was well acquainted with. It was the guy in the peak cap who saluted you perfunctorily at the office entrance. But I couldn't for the life of me fathom what or who 'dollex', 'futures', 'derivatives', 'repo', and 'rolling settlement' were. 'REER', I was informed by an enlightened soul, had something to do with the real value of a currency and not with a generously proportioned derriere. It took two to 'contango', but it wasn't performed on a dance floor. Start-ups were not snobs, nor was sentiment good old-fashioned eruption of emotion. In the new 'ICE' age, bulls and bears have taken over from the birds and the bees. Having not yet been cured of journalism, I'm still keeping my affair with it alive, and kicking. This time it's a dot-com and an entirely fresh set of alphabet -- much like the spy networks of the Cold War era: URL, HTML, WAP, ISP, VOIP... 'Coding' I've managed to decode. 'Broadband' certainly isn't an expansive sweatband, nor is 'gateway' something that divides people into those who want a monument renovated and those who don't. Technology is queer: it turns you into an illiterate overnight. It thrills you too, like living inside the pages of a science fiction book would. The phraseology of the modern era is astoundingly incomprehensible. Precise import emerges only from the correct juxtapositioning of the alphabet. Wonder, whatever happened to the plain lexicon of yore when 'lafda' meant anything from embezzlement to a paternity suit, when your father was 'rusted iron' and an 'item' was a snake with hips? There's more, but I'm tired. Lucky you! Having got the better of HTML, Shishir Bhate has switched his attention to DIARY. Tell us what you think of this diary
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