My college life has provided me with many vivid experiences with people of different characters and thoughts as I travelled through places and phases of life. As I passed through regions of varying languages, I encountered some who spoke Hindi, some spoke English, some Punjabi, some Urdu, some Kannada, some Tamil, some Pahadi and many who spoke a language made up of amalgamation of all these. That’s the thing about living in India — you know one language well but not that well to expatiate in it about anything!

One sunny day as I was travelling back to my hostel and feeling the petrichor of the past day’s shower, I wondered what if there weren’t these many languages? What if there were only one — one language to communicate? Would society be the same as it is right now? Would it still hurt to hear the anguish of racial and religion banter coming from foes from the other lands with the same mother tongue? Would that language be English or Hindi? And what if the animals had this language too? Will there still be poaching and hunting? Will the butcher still be able to slaughter the poor animal pleading in the same tongue in which the butcher’s mother used to sing to him when he was an infant?

When I think of all these scenarios put together the world doesn’t sound worth living in for the randomness, or as scientists use to say “entropy”, of the environment around us is constant. The language variable by which we measure the place where we are will be gone and we would have to rely more on geographical and visual senses to acknowledge the place where we are at. The world will sound banal and the sweet Sunday morning chirpings of the mockingbirds will be replete with them complaining in English about the problems they face at home. Would we be able to live in that world? Would “I” be able to live in that world?

For centuries we have used languages to define nations. We associate French with France, German with Germany, English with the UK and the USA, Hindi with India, Chinese with China, Japanese with Japan etc. By the virtue of this feeling of nationalism associated with the regional languages, the individuals of different countries have laid the foundation of their individual existence to match the society. This has, undoubtedly, created rifts between many regions and have in one way or another been a reason for wars to impose the language supremacy over one another.

The physical and moral existence of an individual “I” will be easily definable if there were a widespread common language. There wouldn’t be any thought barrier to overcome as we would be aware of the language of soliloquies. Sure people across vast geographical lands would be able to resonate well with each other. But would this factor of thinking and speaking in the same language bring many individuals “I”s closer or rather split them more apart?

Hatred among similar language speaking humans is evident in history. Civil wars, political coups, genocides or corruption, think of an example and you can realise that is the encoded in the human genome. What if we count the animals who speak the same language too? This won’t allay the burning hearts of the humans to not slaughter them mercilessly as it didn’t during the Third Reich.

So now the question comes: Where did it all go wrong? How did this feeling of polarity in almost anything substantial churn up in us? Maybe that’s the way we are made — that’s the way all organisms are made. To breathe we have to kill. What better way to drive the killing spree than to encode little kindles of hatred ready to burn in all of us. And in this burning fire to breathe as much life as we can into ourselves, some char themselves up, setting many realms of life we worked hard to create ablaze, watching it burn down in the rain, and as we travel through lands on sunny days and breath this petrichor of the past showers of blood, we feel alive.