Tongue Tied Republic

They say language is culture

But in this country,

language is a loaded gun

with alphabets for bullets —

fired in mother tongues

aimed at migrant hearts

Every syllable is a landmine,

every accent a ticking bomb

wired to someone's fragile ego

We are a nation

where the softest vowels

carry the sharpest knives,

where alphabets become flags,

and each script competes

to carve its manifesto into your skin

Here,

mother tongues are now motherfucking policies —

syllable soldiers marching in Devanagari, Tamil, Kannada,

chanting war cries in phonetics

Here, culture isn’t taught —

it’s thrust down your throat

like it’s an arranged marriage with no safe word

Speak my tongue, or bite yours off

You dare speak Hindi in Bangalore,

and suddenly you're a parasite

You whisper Bengali in Bombay,

and now you're a smuggler of syllables

You stammer in English in Imphal,

and you're accused of colonial necrophilia

It’s not a country anymore —

it’s a map of egos draped in dialects

Every state wants to be the Supreme Court of Syntax

Every city wants to build fences out of fonts

Every faction wants the national anthem

to rhyme with their manifesto

And God forbid your accent doesn't come with

the right regional trauma

This is a republic where

even Google Translate needs a therapist

Where "motherland" means

“mine, not yours,”

and “native” is just

a prettier word for “get out”

And still —

no one knows what we're really fighting for

And the ones screaming “speak my language!”

can’t read past the first paragraph of their own constitution

They’re not defending culture —

they're worshipping their own reflection

in the murky puddle of nostalgia

Culture isn’t

an ancient tongue walled off with barbed grammar

It isn’t a border drawn in consonants.

It isn’t

a hand-me-down god complex

wrapped in regional pride

Culture is consent

Culture is contagion

Culture is what happens

when strangers build a home out of misunderstandings

It is dance in borrowed shoes

It is poetry in foreign mouths

It is love in mistranslation

You know what's truly Indian

Not your bloody language

Not your postal code

It’s your ability to scream about inclusivity

while simultaneously lynching someone for

not pronouncing something the way you deem right

If tongues had gods,

ours would be dying from chokehold

The next time someone asks,

“What’s your native language?”

Tell them:

“Survival, I speak Survival

And every syllable I utter

is just me trying to stay alive

in your alphabet war”