In the golden days of our youth, an unwritten code governed the lanes. If two friends, or even total strangers, walked together and a glint of a lost coin or currency note appeared on the ground, a race of wit began.
The moment the finder reached down, the companion would shout with spontaneous force: “Addas Kaballa!” In our native Kashmiri, this phrase meant “Half of it is mine.” It was a rule.
The finder, by cultural law, would immediately and willingly split the prize. It was a shared blessing.Fast forward to a vibrant recent wedding. As the groom arrived for the reception, he was garlanded with crisp hundred-rupee notes.
In the hustle, the thread broke, and the entire garland fell to the earth. A group of older friends, walking behind the groom, saw it happen. An instant memory ignited. One elderly gentleman shouted, “Addas Kaballa!” His friend, smiling at the flash of their childhood, immediately picked up the money and handed him an exact half.
A group of younger boys, perhaps fifteen, rushed over, eager to claim a piece of the “booty.” But when they tried to speak to the elders, a quiet tragedy unfurled. Their words were fractured, a clumsy mix of “home-induced Urdu” and a few forgotten words, spoken with a modern twang that rendered them incomprehensible.
They were, in the stark idiom, falling down between the two stools.The wise elder offered a challenge: “I will gladly give you my entire share—the whole thing—if you can simply ask for it using the core phrase: ‘Addas chuiey kaballa.
‘”The boys tried. They muttered, mispronounced, and garbled the sounds. Not one could utter it correctly. They had been encouraged to abandon their mother tongue in homes and schools, pushing for a ‘foreign’ language they could not master, while losing the ‘sweet and rich’ language that defined their roots. So the game, and the entire booty, was lost to them.This incident, both funny and heartbreaking, is a mirror to our current crisis. The broken, “fractured Urdu” our next generation now speaks is our Addas Kaballa—half-understood, half-uttered, leaving us with neither.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with learning other languages; multilingualism is a great strength. But in discarding our mother tongue to adopt a foreign one, in “owning it” as our primary identity, we commit the “suicide of an unsound mind.
“Linguists estimate that of the roughly 7,000 languages spoken worldwide, nearly half are endangered and may disappear by the end of this century.
They vanish when a language, once vibrant, stops being passed to children at home, or when communities, for reasons often rooted in economic pressure or self-loathing, “hate their own language.
“When a language dies, we lose its unique folk wisdom, proverbs, oral history, and humour. We are not just heading toward a world where children can’t speak to their grandparents;
we are creating a generation linguistically adrift, disconnected from the very phrases that, in our youth, could claim a fair share of any treasure.
We are allowing a sweet, rich legacy to become a laughing stock. To reclaim our future, we must begin to value the language that already belongs to us.
(The author is a former civil servant from the administrative service. Email: nisargilani57748@gmail.com)
