New Delhi, May 18 -- Usually, when a person speaks a language poorly, it is a sign that they speak some other language very well. But many Indians who eat avocados cannot speak any language well. This includes English, their current dominant language that made them forget their own. I, too, have lost the ability to speak well, especially an Indian tongue, even though I used to think in both Tamil and Malayalam once. It is hard to kill an Indian mainstream language because there are so many of us, but our mother tongues have died inside us and our children do not know them at all.

Yet, I am unable to mourn a dying language. This is because beyond the nostalgia of heritage, the broad reasons why people mourn the demise of a language are ba...