All A-board!
Well, people in the paint business are a happy lot.
Thank God for English, I would never have guessed Kuzhambiagam meant Coffee House and Panikuzhaivu meant Ice-cream! |
With deadlines looming ahead, folks have been rushing all over, complete with paint-cans and brushes, trying to get their signboards up to scratch, as instructed by the powers-that-be.
Multi-lingual societies like to ensure that both local and chosen ‘link’ languages are used.
Fair enough.
Besides, this isn’t anything new; the law’s been around for a while. It’s just that some chunks of citizenry were a little tardy, displaying a combination of the ‘Meant-to-but-didn’t-get-around-to-it’ coupled with the old ‘I’m-safe-as-long-as-The-Teacher-does-not-catch-my-eye’ syndromes. Things can get quite interesting when letters of the alphabets of different worlds share space.
Which explains why some earnest souls have been noticed, carrying dripping paint brushes and wearing pained expressions, gazing at the signboards outside their establishments, wishing they had chosen easier names, instead of going for the obscure and overly clever.
“Some of these letters won’t bend that way,” they murmur.
Meanwhile, the letters, all of them, offer sympathetic support. They are, after all, a friendly, tolerant lot, willing to go with the flow, with changing times – believing in peaceful co-existence.
And that’s always a good ‘sign’.
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