12 March 2026
Have you watched The Office?
Your answer doesn’t affect what I’m hoping you’d takeaway from this piece, but it’s this show that got me thinking about the intricate connection between language and “social utopia”.
Quite early in the show, it’s indicated that Pam, the receptionist, would end her relationship with Roy, the warehouse worker. While this keeps things realistic (complexity of relationships and the fictional tendency of pretty, lead characters coming together), the thought that stumbled into my mind as an Indian is that a relationship between a white-collar receptionist and a blue-collar warehouse worker would almost never blossom in India. I say almost to account for the fact that such stories are often romanticised in Indian films and happen rarely in real life so much so that whenever they do happen it’s more like an illustration of the exception than the norm.
The possibility feels far fetched to the point of being unrealistic in the context of the Indian society and any media portrayals are only done in the spirit of the whole story being around that relationship (exception > norm), and not as a normalised thing that can just be presented nonchalantly taking social acceptance for granted. That underlying, familiar acceptance is the difference that stood out for me in The Office: there’s no extra focus on Pam and Roy’s relationship beyond their incompatibility as two people. Roy’s profession was never explicitly highlighted as a “problem” nor was Pam’s white-collar role as one of the factors for why they separate.
My inferential hypothesis around this dichotomy between two societies anchors on one primary factor. I concede upfront that I am significantly on the verge of being simplistic by putting forth a singular factor for a nuanced, multi-factorial socio-economic behaviour at scale. The factor I arrived at is language. The West tends to have English (and maybe a few others) as the primary language, for both communication and accumulation of knowledge. In a country like India, there are tens of communication languages that people speak and very rarely do they overlap with the languages of literary sources (of knowledge). Either script or dialect or both change even if there is an overlap. This means that the socio-literary capital of the “well educated” and the “ill educated” are drastically different, and these differences accumulate(d) over decades, further to be compounded by the socio-political differences (inadvertently?) caused by the government’s policy being divorced from any thorough analysis of the impact of educating the populace in their “mother tongue”.
Going back to Roy and Pam from The Office, their education levels and consequently their careers might be different. However, both of them most probably grew up speaking and learning in one language, that is English. Their cultural experiences are similar if not same, or the differences can be bridged by mutual exchanges in English. They might physically come from different rungs on the socio-economic ladder but they can easily come together with time and effort with the power of communication and information exchange. Roy can share with Pam the songs that he listened to or the movies that he grew up watching, while Pam can discuss the books that shaped her with Roy so that he can better understand a piece of her. What is a relationship, if not this kind of exchange and understanding?
On the other side, in a country like India, how would the relationship survive, even in the off chance that two people from such different “classes” manage to talk in a common language and come together (despite social taboo, which is another consequence of the compounding effect of segregation over decades, if not centuries in case factors like caste are also brought into the fold)? Their experiences would be super different. That’s acceptable for sure, but how can that difference be bridged over time at least? There HAS to be a common medium — written or otherwise. I understand it’s not black and white, and that love goes beyond differences. But, if I have to bet on reality and probability, the burden of irreconcilable differences can be too much to handle over long periods of time for two people, romantic or otherwise.
This is how/why I think, given where we are as humanity, language plays a major role in social, economic, and intellectual mobility. Particularly intellectual mobility is what reduces the “gap” in the us vs them mindset. Fortunately, even before the rise of AI tools, platforms like KukuFM, etc. have been doing great work in this regard, irrespective of their motivations to start. Making knowledge and information accessible in the many Indian languages beyond English is a step in the right direction. When people from the lowest “strata” of the Indian society get access to the same, best knowledge and ideas out there, I think there would be tectonic shift. Not just in how they see the world but also how they see themselves. The ever lingering hope will be fuelled by confidence that triggers agency. Sooner than later even a relationship between a “blue-collar worker” and a “white-collar worker” will be normalised enough that it is discussed and/or portrayed in passing like it’s the weather and not as the central plot alone.
—867 words
Written on Typerite
https://typerite.app
Have you watched The Office?
Your answer doesn’t affect what I’m hoping you’d takeaway from this piece, but it’s this show that got me thinking about the intricate connection between language and “social utopia”.
Quite early in the show, it’s indicated that Pam, the receptionist, would end her relationship with Roy, the warehouse worker. While this keeps things realistic (complexity of relationships and the fictional tendency of pretty, lead characters coming together), the thought that stumbled into my mind as an Indian is that a relationship between a white-collar receptionist and a blue-collar warehouse worker would almost never blossom in India. I say almost to account for the fact that such stories are often romanticised in Indian films and happen rarely in real life so much so that whenever they do happen it’s more like an illustration of the exception than the norm.
The possibility feels far fetched to the point of being unrealistic in the context of the Indian society and any media portrayals are only done in the spirit of the whole story being around that relationship (exception > norm), and not as a normalised thing that can just be presented nonchalantly taking social acceptance for granted. That underlying, familiar acceptance is the difference that stood out for me in The Office: there’s no extra focus on Pam and Roy’s relationship beyond their incompatibility as two people. Roy’s profession was never explicitly highlighted as a “problem” nor was Pam’s white-collar role as one of the factors for why they separate.
My inferential hypothesis around this dichotomy between two societies anchors on one primary factor. I concede upfront that I am significantly on the verge of being simplistic by putting forth a singular factor for a nuanced, multi-factorial socio-economic behaviour at scale. The factor I arrived at is language. The West tends to have English (and maybe a few others) as the primary language, for both communication and accumulation of knowledge. In a country like India, there are tens of communication languages that people speak and very rarely do they overlap with the languages of literary sources (of knowledge). Either script or dialect or both change even if there is an overlap. This means that the socio-literary capital of the “well educated” and the “ill educated” are drastically different, and these differences accumulate(d) over decades, further to be compounded by the socio-political differences (inadvertently?) caused by the government’s policy being divorced from any thorough analysis of the impact of educating the populace in their “mother tongue”.
Going back to Roy and Pam from The Office, their education levels and consequently their careers might be different. However, both of them most probably grew up speaking and learning in one language, that is English. Their cultural experiences are similar if not same, or the differences can be bridged by mutual exchanges in English. They might physically come from different rungs on the socio-economic ladder but they can easily come together with time and effort with the power of communication and information exchange. Roy can share with Pam the songs that he listened to or the movies that he grew up watching, while Pam can discuss the books that shaped her with Roy so that he can better understand a piece of her. What is a relationship, if not this kind of exchange and understanding?
On the other side, in a country like India, how would the relationship survive, even in the off chance that two people from such different “classes” manage to talk in a common language and come together (despite social taboo, which is another consequence of the compounding effect of segregation over decades, if not centuries in case factors like caste are also brought into the fold)? Their experiences would be super different. That’s acceptable for sure, but how can that difference be bridged over time at least? There HAS to be a common medium — written or otherwise. I understand it’s not black and white, and that love goes beyond differences. But, if I have to bet on reality and probability, the burden of irreconcilable differences can be too much to handle over long periods of time for two people, romantic or otherwise.
This is how/why I think, given where we are as humanity, language plays a major role in social, economic, and intellectual mobility. Particularly intellectual mobility is what reduces the “gap” in the us vs them mindset. Fortunately, even before the rise of AI tools, platforms like KukuFM, etc. have been doing great work in this regard, irrespective of their motivations to start. Making knowledge and information accessible in the many Indian languages beyond English is a step in the right direction. When people from the lowest “strata” of the Indian society get access to the same, best knowledge and ideas out there, I think there would be tectonic shift. Not just in how they see the world but also how they see themselves. The ever lingering hope will be fuelled by confidence that triggers agency. Sooner than later even a relationship between a “blue-collar worker” and a “white-collar worker” will be normalised enough that it is discussed and/or portrayed in passing like it’s the weather and not as the central plot alone.
—867 words
Written on Typerite
https://typerite.app