STORYBOARD
The postman always rings twice – first in Hindi, then English
ARUN RAM 15.07.2019
India Post has decided to conduct exams for the recruitment of postmen in only Hindi and English. No more exams in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada or any of the 15 languages in which candidates took the test till last year. Call it temerity. Or stupidity.
Emails have pushed the post to the verge of extinction in our cities, but they continue to play the amiable messenger in our villages. The Madras high court has stayed the results of the postman test, but if India Post manages to push the envelope, Tamil Nadu may have postmen who don’t speak Tamil. That will be sacrilege.
The postman has been much more than a courier. Not for nothing he has played important characters in literature, films and all that’s art and culture. Urban millennials may not know him — and I feel sad for them for that — but those who have received letters from the khaki-clad man on the bicycle know how integral the postman had been to our lives, delivering love letters, interview calls, appointment orders and, well, regret notes. To the illiterate, he read out letters (husbands living away from home had a tough time expressing their love) and wrote (wives replying had a tougher time) them.
My last of handwritten letters were in the mid-1990s when I was a rookie journalist in Hyderabad. I wrote to my sister in Kerala. I would make sketches of things I saw, on the margins of the ‘inland’ letter and in between paragraphs that detailed my utterly uninteresting life.
When she asked where I lived, I drew a picture of the three-storey house of my landlady, not mentioning that I occupied the garage at the left bottom of the sketch. No email could’ve done that. My sister made friends with her postman as they spoke the same language. I didn’t speak my postman’s language well (not his mistake) and my relationship with him remained transactional.
If excluding regional languages from the medium of the postman test is not a conspiracy, it is a dumb idea. In fact, it should mandatorily be in the local language to ensure that the postman is well-versed in it. The exam does have a section to test the candidates’ proficiency in Tamil (or the respective regional language), but the postman recruitment test of November 2016 smacked of fraud. In a 25-mark section in Tamil, 25 people who scored more than 70 of 100 turned out to be from Maharashtra and Haryana.
Conspiracy theorists aren’t without reason when they say the new system of taking the test only in Hindi and English could result in people who are not proficient in Tamil landing the postman job. I don’t support regional quota in education or jobs. All Indians should get equal opportunities to take up any job anywhere in the country, provided that he/ she is capable of doing it. Someone who can’t speak the local language just cannot be a postman.
If that’s not enough, here are more Tamil bragging rights: Madras was among the first three cities — the others being Bombay and Calcutta — where the East India Company opened the first post offices in India in the mid-1760s, and none of them was a Hindi-speaking city. Jaishankar played the postman in 1966 (‘Gowri Kalyanam’) 11 years before Rajesh Khanna played the role in ‘Palkon ki Chhaon Mein’. The universally lovable Malgudi days came in 1987.
“Dakiya daak laya” is a lovely song, alright, but while in Tamil Nadu I prefer my postman humming “oruvar manadhai oruvar ariya udhavum thevai idhu… vaazhvai inaikkum paalam idhu”.
arun.ram@timesgroup.com
LOST CONNECT: Jaishankar in ‘Gowri Kalyanam’ and Rajesh Khanna in ‘Palkon ki Chhaon Mein’
The postman always rings twice – first in Hindi, then English
ARUN RAM 15.07.2019
India Post has decided to conduct exams for the recruitment of postmen in only Hindi and English. No more exams in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada or any of the 15 languages in which candidates took the test till last year. Call it temerity. Or stupidity.
Emails have pushed the post to the verge of extinction in our cities, but they continue to play the amiable messenger in our villages. The Madras high court has stayed the results of the postman test, but if India Post manages to push the envelope, Tamil Nadu may have postmen who don’t speak Tamil. That will be sacrilege.
The postman has been much more than a courier. Not for nothing he has played important characters in literature, films and all that’s art and culture. Urban millennials may not know him — and I feel sad for them for that — but those who have received letters from the khaki-clad man on the bicycle know how integral the postman had been to our lives, delivering love letters, interview calls, appointment orders and, well, regret notes. To the illiterate, he read out letters (husbands living away from home had a tough time expressing their love) and wrote (wives replying had a tougher time) them.
My last of handwritten letters were in the mid-1990s when I was a rookie journalist in Hyderabad. I wrote to my sister in Kerala. I would make sketches of things I saw, on the margins of the ‘inland’ letter and in between paragraphs that detailed my utterly uninteresting life.
When she asked where I lived, I drew a picture of the three-storey house of my landlady, not mentioning that I occupied the garage at the left bottom of the sketch. No email could’ve done that. My sister made friends with her postman as they spoke the same language. I didn’t speak my postman’s language well (not his mistake) and my relationship with him remained transactional.
If excluding regional languages from the medium of the postman test is not a conspiracy, it is a dumb idea. In fact, it should mandatorily be in the local language to ensure that the postman is well-versed in it. The exam does have a section to test the candidates’ proficiency in Tamil (or the respective regional language), but the postman recruitment test of November 2016 smacked of fraud. In a 25-mark section in Tamil, 25 people who scored more than 70 of 100 turned out to be from Maharashtra and Haryana.
Conspiracy theorists aren’t without reason when they say the new system of taking the test only in Hindi and English could result in people who are not proficient in Tamil landing the postman job. I don’t support regional quota in education or jobs. All Indians should get equal opportunities to take up any job anywhere in the country, provided that he/ she is capable of doing it. Someone who can’t speak the local language just cannot be a postman.
If that’s not enough, here are more Tamil bragging rights: Madras was among the first three cities — the others being Bombay and Calcutta — where the East India Company opened the first post offices in India in the mid-1760s, and none of them was a Hindi-speaking city. Jaishankar played the postman in 1966 (‘Gowri Kalyanam’) 11 years before Rajesh Khanna played the role in ‘Palkon ki Chhaon Mein’. The universally lovable Malgudi days came in 1987.
“Dakiya daak laya” is a lovely song, alright, but while in Tamil Nadu I prefer my postman humming “oruvar manadhai oruvar ariya udhavum thevai idhu… vaazhvai inaikkum paalam idhu”.
arun.ram@timesgroup.com
LOST CONNECT: Jaishankar in ‘Gowri Kalyanam’ and Rajesh Khanna in ‘Palkon ki Chhaon Mein’
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