The girl who got molested spoke only Tulu. But the FIR was filed in Marathi at the police station. And in court, the judgement was in English. This is the tragedy of India. We have too many languages: 17 on the rupee note itself, 18 if we count Braille. Sometimes one wonders whether it wouldn’t be better if we were like United States with just one language as on the US dollar bill. Even Europe faces huge problems as the Union struggles with language: should the lingua franca be German, they wonder, and the French protest vociferously.

Illustration/ Devdutt Pattanaik