Mind your language, but Bill to pagal hai

We have reliably learnt that GoI will be tabling two landmark bills in Parliament this monsoon session that starts tomorrow: Bharatiya (Anti-) Jargon Morcha Bill, 2026 and Bhasha Bandi Bill, 2026. The first legislature aims to outlaw corporate jargon, the second to make pretentious language outside closed-door academic seminars a non-bailable offence. Shashi Tharoor may have already tweeted for the former and against the latter, confusing both his party and treasury bench.

If passed, both laws will do more for public health than banning trans fats. Bharatiya (Anti-) Jargon Morcha Bill targets the plague of 'synergising core competencies' and 'leveraging scalable solutions'. Executives may soon be forced to say 'working together' and 'making things bigger' instead. Bhasha Bandi Bill, meanwhile, takes aim at the academic tendency to describe a sandwich as a 'dialectical negotiation between bread and filling'. Both have been identified as NF, in other words 'Nehru's Fault'.

Of course, enforcement will be tricky. Will police look up online dictionaries instead of Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita? Will offenders be sent to plain-speaking boot camps? Yet, the Bills reflect a noble ambition: to rescue language from those who abuse it while trying to come across as superior. Next, a law against onerous acronyms for names of government schemes, please.