A Question of Language

I thought this was going to be about language.

It wasn’t.

Walk through almost any Indian city and you’ll notice something curious. The café advertises in English. Engineers write in English. Doctors study in English. Scientific papers are published in English. Software is built in English. Even the neighbourhood grocery store quietly assumes you understand enough English to recognise the products on its shelves. The economy has already voted.

Then Parliament convenes, and the country behaves as though none of this exists. Not just Hindi, but a peculiar, ceremonial Hindi that ordinary Hindi speakers rarely use themselves. It isn’t wrong. It simply feels detached from the language people think in.

That struck me as odd. Institutions are supposed to describe the society beneath them. Here, the society evolved while the institution fossilised.

There is an old assumption hidden inside power: authority must sound different from ordinary people. Every institution eventually develops a language of its own. Courts have legalese. Universities have academic jargon. Governments have bureaucratic prose. Sometimes this is unavoidable. Precision has a price. But somewhere along the way, language can stop serving understanding and start serving authority itself. The harder it is to understand, the more serious it appears.

But complexity and precision are not the same thing. We often mistake one for the other because complexity looks impressive.

Feynman could explain quantum electrodynamics to children without insulting either the science or the child. The explanation became simpler. The idea did not.

Politics often moves in the opposite direction. Many politicians cannot explain a tax policy to adults without insulting both.

At first, I thought the obvious solution was English. If it already functions as the language of higher education, science, technology, diplomacy and much of the economy, why continue pretending otherwise inside Parliament?

Then the argument fell apart. India isn’t one linguistic civilisation with many accents. Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Malayalam and Hindi are complete worlds of their own, and choosing one inevitably creates a hierarchy. Ironically, the colonial language became politically neutral because it belonged equally to everyone and no one.

Language, however, is merely the surface. The real question hides underneath.

What exactly is Parliament for?

If Parliament is a symbolic theatre of representation, perhaps every language deserves equal space. If Parliament is the operating system of a civilisation, another criterion appears: efficiency, precision, a shared vocabulary. Nobody accuses mathematics of discriminating against those who dislike algebra.

This is where democracy encounters an uncomfortable mirror. Democracy proudly tells us that anyone can become Prime Minister. We usually hear that as one of its greatest strengths. Perhaps it is. But achievements often cast shadows.

Anyone can become Prime Minister.

Should anyone?

At first, that sounds like an elitist question. Democracies are built on the promise that no office belongs to a particular class of people, and perhaps that’s as it should be. But notice what happened: the moment we asked who should govern, we quietly stopped talking about language altogether.

Nobody expects the Prime Minister to derive Einstein’s field equations or explain the mathematics of quantum tunnelling. That would be absurd. But should they know what quantum tunnelling is? I think so — not because quantum mechanics wins elections, but because governing a modern country increasingly means making decisions whose foundations lie outside politics. Climate science. Artificial intelligence. Semiconductor manufacturing. Quantum computing. Financial systems. Cybersecurity. Space infrastructure.

A leader doesn’t need to master every discipline. They do need enough understanding to recognise expertise, and enough curiosity to know when they don’t. Ignorance doesn’t eliminate expertise. It simply transfers power to whoever sounds the most convincing, and it bothers me more than I expected.

We spend extraordinary amounts of time discussing whether politicians are charismatic, relatable or decisive. We spend remarkably little time asking whether they are intellectually equipped for the century they are governing.

Someone will object that leaders can always rely on advisers. Of course they can. But that only relocates the problem. It doesn’t solve it. The real question is whether a leader knows how to distinguish a good adviser from an impressive fraud, and that itself requires enough grounding in a subject to tell the two apart. A person who cannot recognise expertise cannot reliably choose it either. History suggests that civilisation periodically becomes very expensive when the answer is no.

Perhaps this is why public language matters more than we realise. People who genuinely understand an idea tend to explain rather than decorate. They define terms before arguing over them. They acknowledge uncertainty. Occasionally, they even say the four words the world seems to fear the most:

I don’t know yet.

Looking back, I’m no longer convinced this was ever about language. I didn’t expect to end up somewhere so much less comfortable than where I started.

What kind of minds should a civilisation trust with power?