Syntax

Another quick note while I spend my days doing uninteresting things. The front page of Hindustan Times today described another in the series of slipper-hurling incidents that have become quite fashionable in the last few years. This time, the hurl-ee, so to speak, was Arvind Kejriwal. The report reads— “The black flag-waving, saffron kurta-clad attacker, XYZ of Jalaun district, Bundelkhand, about 200 km north of Lucknow, attacked Kejriwal when he was about to reach the dais at Jhulelal park near Lucknow University to address a meeting on graft.

This is a quick note rather than an elaborate post—I was eating at Shakti (the Women’s Cell run lunch center at IITB) yesterday when a group sitting next to me was discussing what they perceived as a semantic ambiguity. The issue was the right term for the Swedish Embassy situated in India. Would it be the Indian Swedish Embassy, or the Swedish Indian Embassy? From what I observed, opinion was divided, but I wasn’t sure whether both sides really computed different meanings or whether one was just trying to play the Devil’s Advocate, trying to defend what might originally have been a mistaken utterance.