The great comedy of our times is not on Netflix, nor in Parliament, nor even in Bollywood remakes. It is in the way the British and the Indians treat language, specifically English. If aliens ever land and demand, “Show us your finest examples of human stupidity,” we don’t need to panic. We’ll just hand them recordings of British aristocrats ordering hors d’oeuvres they can’t spell and Indian uncles saying “Kindly revert back” as though they’ve just reinvented Latin. The aliens will die laughing and leave us alone forever.
Act I: The British – From Muddy Boots to Fake French Waiters
The British were not always the “Keep Calm and Carry On” brigade with polished accents and tea cups raised at 45 degrees. No, before 1066, they were mud-smeared villagers yelling things like “Oi, pass me that pig” and “Mind the dung heap.” Their language was a mishmash of German grunts and Viking growls: perfect if you wanted to insult your neighbor, but utterly useless if you wanted to impress anyone wearing shoes.
Then along came the Normans with their swords, shiny helmets, and vowels smoother than butter. The British nobility took one look at themselves with potato sacks for clothes, beer breath, a language that sounded like furniture being dragged across stone and decided: “Right, lads, from now on we’re French.”
Overnight, English was demoted to the language of servants, stable boys, and anyone unfortunate enough to work for a living. The nobles spoke French. They didn’t just borrow words, they staged a full-on identity theft. Peasants herded “cows,” lords dined on boeuf. Peasants raised “sheep,” lords ate mutton. Peasants shoveled “pig,” lords devoured pork. The menu itself became a class system. Imagine being so insecure you rename your dinner in a foreign tongue to feel fancy.
Centuries later, the French obsession never wore off. The Brits, now rulers of an empire “where the sun never set,” still sprinkled French in every corner of their speech like cheap perfume over body odor. Why have “starters” when you can have hors d’oeuvres? Why say “meeting” when you can say rendezvous? They colonized India, but couldn’t colonize their own inferiority complex. A country could be looted and ruled, but the British still needed a fiancé instead of a future husband to sound impressive.
And the irony? The French always thought the Brits were gauche pretenders, like villagers who put on wigs and practiced saying “merci” in the mirror. Which, to be fair, is exactly what happened.
Act II: The Indians – Borrowing the Borrowed Goods
Fast-forward a few hundred years. The British pack their bags and leave India, but they leave behind their most toxic export: the idea that speaking English makes you superior. And oh boy, Indians grabbed that idea like it was the last plate of biryani at a wedding.
We didn’t just learn English. We worshipped it. We built temples to it in our schools, with “Spoken English Coaching” painted on walls like holy mantras. Parents sold land to put their kids in convent schools, not for education, but for that elusive accent. Because in India, accent equals class.
A child says “WAH-ter”? Shameful. “WAW-tuh”? Nobel Prize in Literature incoming. Forget calculus, forget quantum physics; if you can say “schedule” like you’re choking on a scone, you’re elite.
Drawing rooms across India are now battlegrounds. “Vase” vs “vahz” debates rage with more passion than India-Pakistan cricket matches. It doesn’t matter that the vase is a ₹199 plastic piece from Amazon; the pronunciation is what separates the bourgeois from the truly “cultured.”
And God forbid you speak English with an Indian accent. That’s social suicide. Your boss will look at you as if you just arrived straight from the cow shed. Meanwhile, the same boss will type emails like: “Respected Sir, Kindly revert back ASAP,” proudly unaware that this sentence is the linguistic equivalent of wearing socks with sandals.
We’ve built an entire caste system 2.0, where your status is measured not by your lineage, not by your education, not by your ideas, but by how convincingly you can pretend to be British. It’s a national audition for Downton Abbey, except everyone is reading the script backwards.
Act III: The French, Still Laughing
And then, in the cosmic balcony, sit the French, sipping wine, polishing their baguettes, and enjoying the spectacle. They started this farce a thousand years ago, and now they get to watch it play out across continents.
“Look at them!” they chuckle. “The English once abandoned their own tongue to imitate us. Now the Indians abandon their own tongues to imitate the English. Quelle tragédie! Quelle comédie! They think sophistication comes from copying people who were copying us. Mon dieu, it’s like watching someone plagiarize a plagiarist.”
Encore: Everyone’s a Clown
So here we are. The British, still strutting around with their fake French perfume, pretending to be posh while eating beans on toast. The Indians, polishing their English like a sacred idol, proudly parroting accents that even the British upper class themselves abandoned after three pints.
One group rebranded sheep as mutton to feel superior. The other group rebrands “water” as “waw-tuh” and feels enlightened. Both are trapped in the same carnival of insecurity, wearing costumes stitched together from someone else’s wardrobe.
The joke isn’t on one side. It’s on both. The Brits colonized half the world, but were colonized forever by the French tongue. Indians got rid of the Brits, but enslaved themselves to English, convinced that “Kindly revert back” is the language of kings.
And through it all, the French are still drinking, still smirking, still saying: “Quelle bande d’idiots.”
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