I love how Indians write English

[xela]

I came across this while Googling for info pertaining to the post I'll be making in a few minutes. It didn't really fit there, not even in a footnote, but I wanted to share it.

Banning of books was unknown in India before the Britishers imported the concept to serve and protect their imperial hegemony. Even though mostly Christians by faith, they signally failed to learn from the life of Jesus Christ that crucifixion of the Messenger could not annihilate the message but made it more efficaciously vibrant and effulgently operative. You can kill the thinker, burn his writings, but not his thought or expressions.  —A.M. Bhattacharjee, in The Hindu.

...crucifixion of the Messenger could not annihilate the message but made it more efficaciously vibrant and effulgently operative. What American or Briton since the nineteenth century would have the balls to write that sentence? For a newspaper column? And expect the editor to let it pass? And be right?

I love clean, simple prose. But in my fairly random (though admittedly limited) encounters with English prose written by Indians, they demonstrate a relish for the entire range of the English vocabulary that I find wonderfully invigorating — in rather the same way a nice curry would be after a week or two of sandwiches.