Misusing your tongue.

This happened when we were coming to Chennai by train.

We were six girls and were chattering aloud. There was a young couple on the side seat beside ours.

I thought I heard them speak a familiar lingo and later realized that they were speaking Sourashtra.

The train left at 10.45 p.m and soon it was time to sleep.

The lights were still on when I was going to bed by around 11.20 (I was the last one to go to bed). I heard the lady on the side seat murmuring in Sourashtra, “Looks like they are not going to turn off the light for now”.

I heard what she said (the lady didn’t know that I could understand what she was saying) and was about to turn off the light when my friend said that she would turn the lights off when everyone is settled in their beds.

By then, the lady impatiently said “Turn off the light… turn off the light…” in a language that only I could understand among everyone else there. The tone and the words she used were so rude that I, at one moment, thought of telling that we would turn off the lights soon (in her mother tongue).

That would have been embarrassing for her and so I didn’t dare to do it. I was chagrined at the thought of how my friends would feel if they know what she had just said.

The best she could have done was to ask us politely to turn off the lights if she wanted it to be done so at the earliest.

People often tend to use their mother tongue to pass comments or say something that others wouldn’t find it soft on their ears if they do understand it, especially in places where that language is not spoken by the native people there or when the population speaking that tongue is very small.

Even the so called ‘educated people’ do it even though it is far from civilized behavior. As long as they get away with it without staining their garb of decent demeanor or hurting their ego, we can see this happen all the time.