Thread by @shrikanth_krish

The Indian obsession with our myriad scripts has meant that as a culture we have not paid enough attention to popularizing writing Indian languages in Latin script

As a result the culture of using diacritics remains a marginal activity

While our umpteen scripts lose popularity by the day, and the younger generation gets increasingly more comfortable with the Latin alphabet than our syllabic Indic scripts, we run the risk of reaching a point where most Indian texts will be unreadable for vast numbers of Indians

The culture of writing Indian languages in Latin needs to be encouraged, with no compromise in pronunciation and by encuraging a culture of diacritic usage

To conserve Indian languages, we better embrace the Latin script more whole heartedly

I know this thread sounds a bit odd, coming as it does in the wake of a festival of sorts on Twitter where people have been falling over each other to write their twitter usernames in the Tamil script

But these displays of enthusiasm mask the underlying reality - which is one of reducing comfort with the syllabic indic scripts among much of the younger Indian urban population by the day

While the Indian languages remain extremely popular, the Indian scripts less so

There are several hundreds of thousands of people in India, if not more, whose 1st language is not English (in terms of their own comfort) but whose preferred script is definitely Latin

As with many other things, the traditionalists have not acknowledged this sea change

It is about time we do, and react to it, to ensure Indian languages remain competitive not merely as colloquial tongues but also as modes of literary expression

Instead there is grandiose talk of building an altogether new script - which incorporates features of many scripts...

Hey...who is going to teach this? Who will learn? What will be the incentives?

And who will arbitrate on the politics that is inevitable in the construction of this synthetic script?

Instead why don't we use the Latin script that people are comfortable with, and modify it to cover all Indian modes of speech?

This doesn't mean you stop teaching Indian scripts...It's about making Indian literature accessible to a broader audience