Chennai
The Nungambakkam police seem to have gone a step further and even dropped the idea of communicating with people in Tamil, or even in English. The police outpost in front of Ayyappan temple in Mahalingapuram, maintained by the Nungambakkam police, has a LED signage, where the script appears to be something similar to Chinese, and nowhere close to Tamil.
DT Next tried to find out whether a number of Chinese people are either suddenly visiting or living in the vicinity of Mahalingapuram temple. But no, no such thing has happened. In fact, as everyone knows, a number of Keraliites and Tamils live in the neighbourhood and visit the temple frequently. There is no known report stating a sudden spurt in Chennaiites wanting to learn Mandarin or any other Asian language. Why then are we having signages in a foreign language? It would seem that even if their jurisdiction is local, Chennai police have started thinking globally. Maybe they wanted to communicate the same to the public in all possible languages?
The wags in the city are clearly having a good time trying to decipher the motive behind the police action. However, some police personnel say that the signages used here could have been sourced from China and it possibly got stuck in the language in which it was programmed. Now, they are wondering whether all communication from the city police to the public are going to be in a similar language which is beyond the grasp of most people. — K Praveen Kumar, Chennai
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