"The Tower of Gabble" - P.Sainath - A Critical Summary

Introduction:

"Development Rhetoric"

In 1946, the famous English author and journalist George Orwell wrote an impassioned essay, "Politics and the English Language", criticizing the dangers of "ugly and inaccurate" contemporary written English. “The Tower of Gabble” by P.Sainath is likewise “a very deft parody of a dialect, called NGO-Speak.” Sainath is an Indian journalist who has extensively covered the horrible realities of poverty in India and the thousands of suicides of small farmers driven to self destruction by neo-liberal policies. His work has won praise from the likes of Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen who referred to him as “one of the world’s great experts on famine and hunger”.

A Satire on the Rhetoric of ‘Development’:

The writer Sainath makes fun of all the verbal jugglery, of the lingua franca used by a majority of the grant applicants and conference planners to obtain a sustainable grant from some major foundation or organisation. This NGO argot or NGO slang, as it is known, is deeply confusing and so complicating to the extent that instead of serving the purpose,

Phrases like “Exploratory Sessions will be based on Interactive Communication” and “They could be roped in via a Plenary Session on Good Governance, Accountability and the importance of Networking” serve to sarcastically highlight the enormous complexity used by ‘Development’ activists, which are poorly understood by the local community most of the time, since they are conceptualised from the perspective of the NGOs.

Further, the use of unnecessary capital letters throughout the essay makes the prose style of these so-called Development activists, highly idiotic in appeal, to say the least. Readability and legibility, which are the key ingredients of good rhetoric, have been compromised for the sake of ‘impressive’ verbal diarrhoea. In short, NGO jargon is employed to give the impression of competence while actually achieving very little.

Favourite Words of NGO-Speak:

All the favourite words of NGO-speak are now used vigorously by Development activists, especially in developing countries like India. Top of the list are “empowerment”, “capacity-building”, “Civil Society Organisations”, “stakeholder”, “Action Groups”, “Focus groups”,  “Governance”, “facilitators”, “Advocacy Outreach”, “Issue-based development”, etc, to name a few.

Such terms are hard to define and still harder to contradict. As “The Economist” rightly points out, “NGO-speak is particularly cherished and fostered in the grant applications that smaller NGOs have to file to the bigger ones. Using the right word is everything. “If you don’t know the buzz words,” says an NGO director, “you hardly have a chance to apply for funds,” which makes the task more uphill for the Development activists.

Desire to Impress through Verbosity and Logorrhea:

Verbosity, also called wordiness, prolixity and garrulousness, refers to speech or writing which is deemed to use an excess of words. Development activists resort to these excessive flow of words, which are highly abstract, and, consequently, contains little concrete language. The absence of concrete language means that it is hard to visualize, and hence seems as though it makes no sense to the reader.

Development activists concern themselves mainly with the lay populace, and hence, when interacting with them, it is out of place to use verbal grandiloquence while dealing with uneducated individuals. These concepts sound quite unnatural, and also smirk of a tendency to impress the possible donors. The art of rhetoric, lies in making even the most complex of contexts into a simple and easy to read structure. But, the ‘rhetoric of the NGOs is the other way round. Too much of complicated information is bombarded onto the reader at the risk of losing the main point. In such a situation, it becomes very difficult to identify the intended core message of the sender.

Sainath takes a dig at the resolutions adopted at these NGO meets, where they resolve to ‘examine Paradigm Shifts in the Development Debate while strengthening Conscientization, Advocacy Outreach and Institution-Building.’ Most of these words seem out of place or redundant to the point of being meaningless.

The Need to be Simple and Profound:

Ideas need to be simple and profound in order to have the desired effect on the readers. The writer should work hard on making his ideas understandable to his readers. Since the case for Development focuses on the upliftment of the underprivileged, these ideas need to be explained to them in simple, concrete terms, rather than wallowing in pompous and over-elaborate writing. 

As Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers, rightly opines,

“Writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another; the writer's job is to make his reader apprehend his meaning readily and precisely.”

Conclusion:

The article, by satirising the verbal pomposity of the Development activists, pleads for the use of plain English, an English that promotes clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language – particularly in relation to official communication. The intention of such Development writers should be to write in a manner that is easily understood by the target audience: appropriate to their reading skills and knowledge, clear and direct, free of cliché and unnecessary jargon.

*****

Our acknowledgements are due to:

Wikipedia.com for elaborations on words related to Verbosity and Plain English.

The Economist.com for words related to NGO speak.