There is little doubt that English it is that linguistically binds India together, much as the anti-Angrezi lobby would want to disagree. Despite their sporadic attempts to put it down, English has always been valued as a passport to opportunities –more so now in the wake of India’s growing IT and outsourcing successes.

It’s not hard for anyone who’s been about town to see that the “Queen’s language” has taken on die-hard Desi hues and is as much Indian as pappadum and pav bhaji. Besides, India’s stake in the English language is steadily growing, what with more than a thousand words of Indian origin in the latest edition of the Oxford dictionary.

Considering that the principal function of language is to get a message across with a fair amount of accuracy in a given milieu, Indian English, Hinglish and their various doses in other Indian languages fits the bill extremely well --and colourfully too. Locally flavoured malapropisms may come in the way of grasping a sentence quite often, but its great fun. I once overheard somewhere, “That boy has completely gone outline. If you don’t take care, he may even become a druggist.” Get it? Well, replace “outline” with “out of hand” and “druggist” with “drug addict”!

Such sparkling examples are to be seen and heard everywhere. In Chennai there is a cold storage shop that is called “Sizzlers Cold Storage” and in rural Tamil Nadu I have seen a huge billboard that advertises a hotel that has baths with attached rooms! When in a southern semi-urban “hotel”, which was not much more than a roadside café, I enquired if they had a chicken dish that was served boneless, the waiter replied, “No boneless saar, but we can give you less bones.” A restaurant in Mangalore describes itself as a “Scandinavian style restaurant serving Moghlai, Chinese, Punjabi and Continental dishes.” Of course it serves the very very Manglorean idli sambar and dosas too!

Then there is that growing genre of delightful desi-English wisecracks that does the rounds of the Net, adding so much more Indian spice to life online. What do you call a ghost with syphilis? STD Bhooth! Stranded at an airport for several hours because of a delayed flight, one co-passenger said, “Now we know why travelling is called ‘suffer’ in Hindi.” And then there are the Mallu, Gujju, Tamil, Bengali and Maharashtrian jokes that we have all heard. Where would all these jokes be if it weren’t for Indian English?