Tag: language

Evil Eye and Linguistic Lies: My GrandMaa Reminded me of Postmodernism

Image from here

Salam,

A few months ago, during a visit to my hometown, Phalodi in Rajasthan, a muse found me in the most ordinary (yet dearest) of moments—while speaking with my grandmother and my sister. Yes. As my grandma spoke of evil eye and my sister spoke of wish-fulfilling prophesies, I couldn’t help but wonder how deeply our thinking and behaviour are shaped by the assumption that words carry stable, definite meanings—meanings that are somehow validated or approved by some higher authority, some final source, even God.

How the Conversation Began?

So, it happened that I was sitting with my sister one day, talking about the usual odd mix of things—wishes, luck, and the darn dreaded Buri Nazar (evil eye) that our grandmothers always warned us about.

Somewhere between laughter and sincerity, we came to wonder — how much of our beliefs rests on assumptions we rarely pause to probe. Assumptions that things begin at a fixed point and end at another, that every event must have a definite, definable, describable cause, that truth can always be tethered to some neat and knowable explanation.

We like to centre ourselves in a story or speech like that: I suffered because of X, or I will be blessed if Y happens. Like … ‘This’ happened because of ‘that’, period. End of story. The speaker, the wish-maker, the sufferer—always pivot around which meaning is spun. Yet in clinging to these word-ly anchors, we often miss the messier (and perhaps more beautiful reality?) that meaning is never still, singular, stable. Language itself is fluid, restless, protean. And maybe life, like language, resists the comfort of fixed points. There are far more complex networks of interdependencies around us that cannot be escaped easily through words.

That being said, I do ‘intuit’ why it happens- too much faith in the words having singular meanings. For one, language—the way we have been taught to take it— makes us believe that the speaker/listener is the centre of the speech; That their words have some definite meaning as the speaker intends. It tricks us into thinking that meaning originates from a singular source, i.e. us, and travels outward in a straight line—toward truth, impact, or divine judgment.

For example, I recently underwent some surgery, and it came at a time when other parts of my life were already in distress. At first glance, one could say (and some actually did) that “my planets aren’t aligned,” or “Maybe this is God punishing me.” But if we look at the situation differently, we can see something else entirely. That X amount I spent didn’t just disappear—it became someone’s salary. The amount I donated to a hospital helper may have been used to buy vegetables, pay rent, or care for someone else. Seeing this way changes the equation. Doesn’t it? Well. This way, my pain, my suffering, or more generally my ‘problem’, then, was not an isolated “negative” event. Instead, it was part of a much broader system of interdependence.

This reframes everything. As cliché as it may sound, things aren’t necessarily “good” or “bad” in themselves. They don’t have an intrinsic nature or value. Similarly, texts (including words, events, experiences, and things) don’t carry fixed, stable, singular, or inherent meanings. They’re always part of an ongoing circulation of meanings, relationships, and interpretations.

This reminds me of another instance that our grandmother shared with us the same day. My grandmother, that day, told me that my grandfather once said to her, “If you sleep too much in the morning, you won’t be able to sleep at night.” Later that day, when she couldn’t sleep, she took his words as a curse—as Buri Nazar. But was it so? I don’t think so. To me, this was just another instance where we assume words carry a direct, unchangeable meaning, as though someone or something—God, fate, karma—is out there eavesdropping, and then enforcing a verdict based on those words?

Take another example. Let’s say I tell someone, “You have a beautiful ring,” and the next day they lose it. If they then blame me—claiming I gave them the evil eye (it happens a lot in my town/culture)—what they’re really saying is that there’s an invisible entity that interprets my words and assigns meaning to them, entirely independent of my intention. But if that’s true, then this entity isn’t just misinterpreting my praise—it’s actively converting good intentions into harm. That’s not divine intelligence. That’s a petty and irrational being. God will get ‘the’ meaning. 

This is where I see a problem with the religious and metaphysical structures that many of us inherit almost unknowingly. They tether our thinking to certain assumptions—about cause and effect, about meaning, about authority, about language, about time and space. These become, in a sense, our a priori conditions of thought and speech. And in doing so, they do not merely shape what we think or believe; they delimit what we can even think, what we can imagine believing. They circumscribe what we are permitted to say, to do, to wish, or even to desire.

Let me be clear: the problem, for me, is not with religion, nor with any particular belief system. It lies deeper—in the metaphysical faith that quietly governs our everyday use of language. We think in binaries: beginning/end, good/bad, speaker/listener, cause/effect. And we take these as natural givens. But are they? Maybe not. Perhaps they are the very traps postmodern thinkers warned us about—the illusion of stability, the tyranny of fixed meaning.

So perhaps what we need is not just new words, but new ways of thinking—ways that resist this compulsion to anchor meaning once and for all. Yet here, I run into a paradox. If words have no fixed meaning, how is it that we still communicate, write, and understand each other? Surely, there is some meaning in words, however fragile or fleeting. Or perhaps, unsettlingly, we do not need to know meanings to use them, to live through them.

Anyway, that’s a thought I’ll save for a more extended reflection in a future post. Or, in French, I would say, c’est tout!.

फिर मिलेगे … in the next post.

Thanks, Orwell, for reminding me of Some ‘Unmeant’ Words in IP

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Bonjour,

The other day, thanks to a sharp young friend from NALSAR — Ruchir Anand — I ended up reading George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language. But why do I say “ended up”? Well, ‘tis because I hadn’t planned on it. But once I started, it felt like a lecture – a brimming mix of bitterness and brilliance -that I could not not attend.

Among many sharp observations, Orwell said something that resonated with me. He noted how certain words or expressions — despite having no clear or consistent meaning — continue to be used, either euphemistically or dysphemistically. Talking of terms like democracy or fascism, he argues, has become so emotionally charged and overused that they are routinely used (/deployed like tools) without any precise definition. Tellingly, it is done with the tacit understanding that they don’t mean anything fixed at all. One can just toss them into any argument and come out looking holy.

Of course, now I can take a train to meet and bring Derrida to the Orwellian domain. And trust me, I am tempted to, too. For one, following Derrida’s notion of différance, one could level the same charge against the entire enterprise of language itself — that all meaning is slippery, deferred, and non-existent. And perhaps, does that convincingly so. But let’s hold back, for now and focus on a narrower category: words that are inevitably imprecise, and they are so with consensus. Yet they are used, assumed, and even unabashedly understood to convey a particular meaning, good or bad.

In Orwell’s words -“Many political words are similarly abused. The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies “something not desirable.” The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another. In the case of a word like democracy, not only is there no agreed definition, but the attempt to make one is resisted from all sides. It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using that word if it were tied down to any one meaning. Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way. That is, the person who uses them has his own private definition, but allows his hearer to think he means something quite different.“

This Orwellian insight flies in the face of intellectual property (IP) discourse, which is filled with such means that mean everything and nothing all at the same time. And if there’s one phrase that fits fine in this farrago, like a lazy politician before an election: it’s the much-bandied word:  “balanced”. It goes in the same shiboleth flavours: “A balanced IP system,” “a balanced copyright framework,” “the need for balance between right holders and the public”. Pitched as self-evidently virtuous, it rarely comes with clarity. 

But ask the speaker and you’ll find: it means whatever the speaker wants it to mean. After all, what is balance? For whom? When? Under what history? Hither comes a sound of silence. A loud one, my friend. The word is perhaps mightier than the magical spell — abracadabra, you say it, you’ve justified your point. 

Yes, I may be biased in raising the example of “balance” — after all, it is the very subject of my PhD. (See this journal article called “Taking Copyright’s ‘Balance’ Too Seriously” where I expounded my claim in detail.) But even a brief introspection on the IP field reveals how much of its justificatory language — especially around what IP is for — is fraught with seductive yet slippery expressions.

Sample words like creativity, innovation, progress, and public interest. Lovely words, for sure. For they ring with righteous hue, sounding self-evidently good and noble. But on closer inspection, they often function — or rather, non-function — precisely as Orwell said: carrying emotional weight without definitional clarity. The speaker intentionally invokes such terms/words/expressions, thereby evading the weighty moral burden of having to exemplify the phrase they’ve uttered. Just say, “IP fosters creativity,” or “IP promotes innovation,” and voilà — the phrase earns its stand, rarely questioned, often axiomatically accepted.

The upshot is that these words are, as I like to call them, un-meant words which have managed to mean everything and nothing at once(!). And this is what makes them instrumental — and dangerously convenient —in almost any policy debate.

Of course, this isn’t unique to IP. Law and policy are full of such ‘un-meant’ words. But given how central these words/rhetorics (like the ones I flagged above) have become in global IP debates, especially endorsed through institutions like WIPO or even national IP offices, it is high time we parse the political function of such snafu signifiers. Because these signifiers — or even “noble nothings” as they are — are not just bad language. They’re politics in disguise, I posit.

So tell me, have you come across other such words in IP or law? The kind that is made to sound essential but is hollow from the inside?

Drop them in the comments. Don’t worry. I won’t misuse “transparency.” 🙂 See you in the next post.

Note: While penning this post, I was constantly recalling a solid post from Swaraj Barooah on SpicyIP called Solutionism, Social Innovation and IP.