NITTE

The conference room at NITTE that day was packed with students in anticipation of a warm intimate session about translation. We began with a Just-A-Minute session that invited yet another set of unique languages. Among the colleges we visited in our programme, NITTE had the highest number of languages that we encountered in a single room, 17. Apart from the familiar Kannada, Tamil and Bengali, we heard Ao and Sümi, both Sino-Tibetan languages that are spoken by different Naga tribes and Memoni, spoken by the Memons, a Muslim community from the Kathiawar region. As we listened to these different languages, we tried to look for familiar phonetic intonations and lilts while also noticing patterns in the unfamiliar.

Since the students were from such varied backgrounds outside of Karnataka, the recipe-translation exercise also invited culinary diversity. From creating a fusion fried rice of sorts, to arguing about different types of pani-puri to finding the right word for a seemingly simple step in the recipe — do we wash the chicken or do we clean the chicken while preparing chicken sukka? The room overflowed with laughter and enthusiastic banter during this activity.

NITTE was also a college where our crowd was largely composed of non-literary students that nevertheless displayed a great flair and interest with regards to literature. And the range of voices and experiences left us feeling like we had witnessed a beautiful living archive of language and cultural memory.