Diplomats visit victims of shelling on LOC.
Ladakh Flash Point
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No there is no official evidence of a threat of an India Pakistan missile exchange or CENTCOM intervention so we can leave it there. Praveen Sawhney's analysis about Pakistan's willingness to escalate during the February 27th incidents and India backing doen is correct. Other recently retired Indian defense officials say exactly the same thing on news channels such as BBC.
Usually reliable news agencies such as Reuters keep persisting with these conjectures so we can leave it to them to explain their sources.
As far as I know, Hindi and Urdu are basically dialects of the same mother language, albeit with different scripts. Hindi uses Sanskrit style script while Urdu uses Persian style script.
My Hindi isn't quite up to scratch, but I can pretty much fully understand what Imran Khan is saying in that video, I think he speaks in what some Indians may call "Hinglish" which is a mix of English and Hindi (Hurdu?)
By "stamped out" do you mean the script has been stamped out? I have heard somewhere that in Bollywood they use Urdu dialect, although I don't know how true this is.
"Stamped out": Dialing back to Pre-Independence united India; the British in their efforts to bring unity in communications in Northern, Eastern and North Western India employed Urdu in the Persian Script and Hindi in the Devnagari script with the vocabulary kept simple and drawn from common usage instead of by literary fanatics. This was called Hindustani by the British and most India from as far as Hyderabad and Bangalore in the South used this language in day to day use. The most important use of Hindustani was in the British Indian Army where it developed into an effective communications language and it was learned by senior British Indian Army officers. You can search the internet for General Wavell addressing his troops in World War 2 in Urdu-Hindi-Hindustani. Most educated Indians in Northern and North Western India learned both Urdu and Hindi in their respective scripts and since the government policy was of dual use (signs, documents, announcements, ) there was a high degree of comfort across united India. India's entertainment industry also adopted Hindustani ( both scripts) very comfortablly.
Post-Independence there have been dramatic changes to the language policy in India. India adopted Hindi in the Devanagari script and banned the use of the alternative Persian scripts. Teaching of Urdu or Hindustani in the Persian script was rapidly banned or and discontinued in all government and private schools and the universities closed down their Urdu language departments. The government employed tens of thousands of "Hindi officers " to enforce the language policy. A language department was set up to eliminate all the common Hindustani words and wordsmiths worked hard to create words with no Hindustani content. There were penalties in promotions and benefits for not knowing or using Hindi in the Devanagari script ( particularly in the Railways and major Government agencies) and the worst affected were immigrants and displaced populations from what is now the territory of Pakistan who knew Hindustani only in the Persian script.
Urdu has been banned in the region where it had been in use for at least 300 years. The word Urdu is a Mongol Turkish word meaning tent or camp because it was the link language of India's Armed Forces 200 years before the British took control and used right up to 1947.
Urdu and the Persian script has been banned in all Indian states and Union territories and the last nail in the Urdu coffin was hammered just last week in the passage of the Jammu and Kashmir Language act which replaces Urdu used in Kashmir with Hindi in the Devanagari script.
Urdu in Pakistan and Hindi in Indis now bear little relation to the common Hindustani. Indians and Pakistanis no longer talk to each other because there is no longer people to people contact and given the way the language has developed even if they wanted to they can't unless they switch to English.
Indian and Pakistani diplomats speak fairly good English so they can communicate when necessary and Indian and Pakistani army field commanders communicate in English during ceasefire negotiations or flag meetings. On the rare occasions politicians on either side do meet such as the famous Modi Nawaz Sharif meeting or Atal Bihari Musharraf meeting or phone conversations they use interpreters ( whether translating into common English is unknown).
India's movie industry no longer uses Hindustani which is dramatically evident in its virtual eclipse as an entertainment source in Pakistan where the population has effectively turned to dubbed Turkish and Central Asian mass media entertainment ( Ertugrul Ghazi series as an example).
Pakistan's own entertainment industry thrives with a robust TV drama capability and conversely Pakistani TV soaps and movies ( particularly war movies) are dubbed in Turkish, Persian and Arabic and exported. Thus Urdu seems to be relinking to its Central Asian heritage.
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My family does groceries at an Asian cash-and-carry owned by Pakistanis and find it quite easy to converse with the workers there, who seem to be a mix of Indian and Pakistani.
Do they speak Urdu in Balochistan and KP?
Not relevant. That's a pidgin Hindustani like Portunol, Cockney or Creole for petty grocery transactions.
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Yes, they do speak, read and write Urdu in Balochistan and KP and it is the medium of instruction there. THAT is the beauty of the language that only 18% of the population in Pakistan declared Urdu as their mother tongue but it has emerged as an effective link and communications language. Urdu is widely used in the Gulf countries where there are Urdu editions of Arabic newspapers.
Pakistan has followed China's example to some extent. China has been spectacularly successful in having carried out language reforms, simplifying its language while
at the same time making it universal and acceptable.
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Stress relief during stressful times;
This video clip has coined the term
"Morbaba" or "Peacock Grandpa";
Completely false claim by @Figaro.
These are not Indian soldiers but mere constables of a State Police Force's armed unit. One can see a police officer was standing for inspection in the initial part of the video itself.
Absolutely nothing to do with Indian army or even Indian paramilitary forces.
Advantage to China:
The demise of Urdu in India and the growing linguistic cultural divide between India and Pakistan is extremely beneficial in the long term strategic environment and the Pakistan China relationship.
Under different administrations in India, the left wing secular Indian nationalists had always projected the India Pakistan linguistic and cultural links as a "one people " soft power stance ; basically telling China that it could never replace India in the cultural mindset of the Pakistanis. According to the left wing secular nationalists in India, China was the "outsider " and India will eventually co-opt Pakistan which they viewed as a rebel province that seceded from the mother country under foreign colonial manipulation. Vaguely similar to the way China views Taiwan. Given the residual cultural linguistic similarities Pakistan would eventually relapse into an Indian federation or at least as a protectorate,
Why this will never happen has already been discussed. But left wing India watches with dismay as Pakistan pivots to China and Central Asia and the Chinese language is being learned in Pakistan at the school level. Apart from foreign ministry translators and some Archeologists and historians no one is studying Hindi in the Devnagri script in Pakistan. Even the Sikh temple in Pakistan recently connected via the Kartarpur corridor has no signs in Hindi though it is intended for pilgrims from India.
A delightful video from China that causes much heartache to secular Indian nationalists; there will never be a similar India Pakistan video.
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I don’t see how it is less embarrassing that they are part of the police force. Here in the U.S. even teenagers can scale that wall with no problem.
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