Searching for my roots
I was born and brought up in Rajapalayam ,which 60 years back was only quarter its size now,with just about 25% of its present  population.My parents were from a village 15kms east of this town.I have met my grand parents,uncles,aunts and cousins,can't say I know them,or identify with them socially or culturally.An alienation process was set in motion as far back as 50 years.Though I speak the same regional variety of the language,I speak it differently,the inflection is very different as is the choice of words-the change brought about by a faster assimilation of the local languages-Tamil and a different caste specific variety of Telugu spoken by Rajus.

If there is so much alienation within a span of  50 years,one can only imagine the extent of alienation that must have occurred in the 500 years since the first wave of migration from the Telugu speaking regions of Andhra!An attempt at speaking in Telugu in a campus in Hyderabad, sensitive to`issues of language,caused peals of laughter! An academic exchange revealed that I spoke like some one who had dropped out and emerged after centuries speaking a fossilised language of ancient literature-a skeletal remains of it, as my vocabulary was hardly 200 word strong.I do not use several words my parents used,perhaps because I don't use the language as much as they did,living and interacting with people speaking several other languages.My son's Telugu must be just a 100 word strong.

Roots?What roots?!We have been uprooted and have put our roots elsewhere,and yet there is this yearning for the long forgotten lands.Retracing our steps requires effort,some academic rigour. We have  a system of gothras and family names to go by.Most family names are names of villages,the original migrants had left behind.But names of places also change in course of time!

There is perhaps a case in favour of the purists,who are passionate about preserving the purity of language.Herein lies our identity.Let us speak our mother tongues and learn the script and insist on our children learning it,even if they have to be proficient in the language of the state,a national and an international language.Not a great burden,linguists tell us.A child can learn many languages with ease before the age of 14.The part of the brain that fascilitates language learning loses its efficacy after that.So let us catch them young and keep alive our quaint habits,our oral traditions,if we are to retain our identity-in an alien climate.