The language of Love ...

As my script was running through gigabytes of data, spitting some weirdly encoded information, I was feeling very bored to sit staring at the monitor and running commands like "ps x", "ls -lh some_arbitrarily_long_path", zmore some_zip_archive etc for the umpteenth time just to see if the process (also me) is alive. Just then I got reminded that my friend had asked me to buy something from M.G. Road. Wow! What a wonderful reason to go to M.G. Road.

The timing could not have been more apt, it was 5:30 PM and a gentle drizzle had just stopped making the setting perfect. I walked along the pavement gazing at the huge buildings (believe me!), crossed the Mayo Hall and Symphony Cinema Hall and finally reached the opticals shop, all the while watching people and listening (no deliberate over hearing) to all the languages spoken in Bangalore. The crowd primarily consisted of young couples with dreamy eyes walking hand-in-hand, making hush-hush statements in mostly English. I was wondering if English is the lingua franca of 'modern day' Love or if these couples don't have a common native tongue.

I bought the contact lens cleaning solution and was returning back to my office on the opposite pavement. Long after the end of the 'colourful' Brigade Road area, my eyes caught the sight of a bright young couple standing in a place unusual for such meetings. The girl appeared to be highly animated, so I stopped for a while and watched. Having been exposed only to the good old Doordarshan and having been forced to watch every program relayed by them on Sundays including the 'News for the hearing impaired', I could recognise the sign language she was using. Oh! I realised that either the girl is dumb or the boy is deaf or both. The question I had about the language of Love is long gone from my mind as I walked back to my office ...