It’s all in the name

Sometimes I toy with the idea of getting a house. Perhaps I could afford something in the distant suburbs. This delusion is usually exacerbated on weekends as I flip through newspapers advertising housing complexes with ‘hill’, ‘sea’, ‘green’, ‘garden’, ‘lily’, ‘lake’ or ‘forest’ in the name.

I know, and the builders know, that there will not be any lilies or forest glades. Hills and forests will have disappeared and if there is a water body around, the view will be blocked by newer buildings. Then why do they persist in these little games of nomenclature?

I suppose, it’s because deception works. As long as you go on calling things by false names, there’s a good chance people will go on buying the lie. We can go on pretending that every morning our faces will be caressed by mist although we know it will actually be smog.

This is why no real estate developer calls his building ‘Smog Heights’. Instead, he peddles nature as if it were a byproduct of construction. This is why trash-incinerating firms give themselves names like ‘Ecopolis’ even though they are not recycling anything.

Language deceptions are all around us. Yet we rarely call people out on the deceptions embedded in their choice of words.

Photographers describe a certain model as being ‘comfortable with her body’ when they actually mean that she poses in bikinis without kicking up a fuss. Comfort has nothing to do with it. The poor model may well have undergone surgeries to change her body! Advertisers and fashion magazines call a woman ‘real’ when they actually mean to say that she’s not thin. We talk of mountaineers ‘conquering’ mountain peaks when we actually mean that they just about survived the climb.

And when we talk about how our small towns are getting ‘developed’, what we really mean is that they are starting to look more and more like bigger towns. But what does it mean anyway — development?

Anupam Mishra (whose writings on water conservation should, in my opinion, be translated into all Indian languages and made mandatory reading in schools) in a recent essay talks about looking for this word ‘development’ in mainstream Indian literature from 50 years ago. You’d be hard-pressed to find it.

Gandhiji taught himself to write with both hands for he had no time to stop and rest. The collected works comprise nearly a hundred volumes of about 500 pages each. That’s about 50,000 pages and Mishra, who works with the Gandhi Peace Foundation, says he hasn’t been able to read each page. But he noticed that Gandhiji hardly used the word ‘development’.

It is hard to argue that Gandhiji didn’t give a damn about changing India for the better. One can only conclude that he cared more than to throw an empty word at our faces and then expect the poorest amongst us to make sacrifices for ‘development’ that would not benefit them.

Mishra points out that the moment we start judging ourselves against this word ‘development’, we are forced to use words like ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’. Then we must decide whether we are this or that. So when we talk about development, we must not talk about stealing natural resources. So we talk about our growing hunger for electricity and water, but not about who we take it from.

And now that it is all around — this ‘development’ word — we can’t help using it, if only to question what it is. Even Mishra admits that these are muddling times. But perhaps we could figure out what to do if we can first figure out what we want to say.

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she  never actually tried)