Tuesday 10 April 2018

If we ban English

If English is outlawed, all the upper class kids will lose one large inherited privilege, and the ground will start getting leveled. The village kids will begin to come into their own.
Will all the caste bashers be willing to face this modern casteism ? And to put their children in government schools to start walking the talk ? So much easier to keep abusing the brahmin.
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Komakkambedu Himakiran The ones "abusing" the "Brahmin" are the ones resisting English too. Just see who supports mother tongue education, least likely to be upper caste people.
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Aparna Krishnan Many of the 'activists' I suspect do not see that their fluent english heritage is part of the modern model of casteism. And many who fight the 'brahmins', and not fighting english hegemony, or even seeing it for what it is. How big is your group which questions both the FC dominance and English dominance, among all the FC questioners ?
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Komakkambedu Himakiran Haha, it's called Dravidian movement!

We are not responsible for the choices of our parents to give us English education. That was because of the economic conditions created by centralized decision making of upper caste thinkers. Green revolution, white revolution, big dams, etc. 

Our generation we are fighting for mother tongue rights, but there are people here who have been reaping the benefits of English education for several generations and they are the ones campaigning against Mother language rights, right to education, local economy, native breeds.
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Aparna Krishnan Yes. But there are many other anti-caste groups, which do not even see the modern casteism of Emglish-fluent and nother-tongue-fluent. The activists there stay comfortable in their english privileges, while brahmin-bashing. That is what i questioned.
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Komakkambedu Himakiran The category you talk about will be purely leftist(actually they are pro upper caste too, not really Left). Like we always say, right or left is not representative of us.
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Aparna Krishnan pro-upper caste ? and brahmin bashing ? and english celebrating ? too many contradictions.
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Komakkambedu Himakiran Of course, there are Baniyas and Kshtriayas too!
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Sunitha Choudhry Brahmins have lorded over all communities for 100s of years. In so many infinitesimal ways. Now that they are being brought down to earth by other mortals, they are defending their turf. I belong to the clan myself and speak from personal experience how narrow minded and casteist we can be. Time to break all the shackles of high birth and all that jazzy crap. And accept that we all hail from the same dna.
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Aparna Krishnan my only point is that the modern brahminismm of fluent-english-speaking-creatures is rather conviniently bypassed. Because that includes each of us as tyrants. And thats not nice to see !
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Sunitha Choudhry I am unable to separate the two. They are just different versions of one.
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Aparna Krishnan not at all.
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Sanjay Maharishi In one of my family group, mostly written in Hindi, the jokes are about how the country is suffering because of reservations. God really tests our patience to the hilt.
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Aparna Krishnan i seem to be living in a rather small circle, away from all this chatter. thank god.
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Sailesh Bhupalam is english really a privilege? i thought you didn't believe that. And if it is a privilege, like say money, are you saying we should not let children inherit parents' money? that's communism. 
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Aparna Krishnan yes, i do not think children should inherit their parents money - i think it should go to the child in greatest need. i do not think i am a communist. i am just me.
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Sailesh Bhupalam then nobody would be interested in producing any wealth at all except what is necessary. That'll push the whole society to poverty. It'll increase the children in need. 

It sounds good when spoken or written, but doesn't work when implemented because of human nature. 

And about English, we don't need to cut people's legs to make everybody equally tall, In fact we should do the reverse, push the others up. Our mother tongue was also not english. How did we make it? it's just another language. There is no value associated with it. The utility on the other hand is it gives a common platform to the country and makes us link to the world very well.
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Aparna Krishnan not at all. its a deeply casteist symbol. and its not possible to make every village child fluent in english. nor imo desirable. many asian countries have survived well with pride and moorings in their own language.
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Sailesh Bhupalam  i do not agree with english educated to be caste at all, you just use the word wherever you think appropriate, but caste has a definition. If people can chose to be educated in english and easily do that, how can it be caste? caste brackets us based on birth, high birth and low birth. Education gives us an opportunity to be whoever we want to be. What you want is to limit everyone to their lowerst common denominator, if the simplest form of organisation is farming, everyone should do farming. If the simplest form of education is pottery and basket weaving everyone should only be taught that. seems anachronistic to me. 
Yes, other countries have survived because they have a common language like mandarin and japanese. We have more than a 100 major languages in the country. so we can't talk to each other, unless we move beyond mother tongue.
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Sailesh Bhupalam  i do not agree with english educated to be caste at all, you just use the word wherever you think appropriate, but caste has a definition. If people can chose to be educated in english and easily do that, how can it be caste? caste brackets us based on birth, high birth and low birth. Education gives us an opportunity to be whoever we want to be. What you want is to limit everyone to their lowerst common denominator, if the simplest form of organisation is farming, everyone should do farming. If the simplest form of education is pottery and basket weaving everyone should only be taught that. seems anachronistic to me.
 i do not agree with english educated to be caste at all, you just use the word wherever you think appropriate, but caste has a definition. If people can chose to be educated in english and easily do that, how can it be caste? caste brackets us based on birth, high birth and low birth. Education gives us an opportunity to be whoever we want to be. What you want is to limit everyone to their lowerst common denominator, if the simplest form of organisation is farming, everyone should do farming. If the simplest form of education is pottery and basket weaving everyone should only be taught that. seems anachronistic to me. 

Yes, other countries have survived because they have a common language like mandarin and japanese. We have more than a 100 major languages in the country. so we can't talk to each other, unless we move beyond mother tongue.
 Gayathri Nair I too believe, with Sailesh, that a great deal more must rather be invested in granting underprivileged children access to quality education (however such education be defined). The government schools even in metros are very poorly managed and staffed. Surely, there could be much greater emphasis upon uplifting the schools that admit the poor, the general hospitals, and other infrastructure that are accessible to the underprivileged, so that they are granted more access to a better quality of life, even within the ambit of their circumstances. I am afraid that I am indeed one of your circle who is yet to be convinced that reservation is the answer. If there is a single policy innovation to uplift the poor and create equality, I would rather recommend creating incentives (such as better pay) for the better educated and privileged sections of society to give back to key social institutions benefiting the poor, such as our government hospitals and schools, especially the rural poor. An even greater innovation might be some effective structural amendment to discourage corruption in governance so that the money that changes hands to purchase democratic stability among greedy contenders for power, at the expense of the public, is returned to the people- not to patronize, but to empower them. I think English is the language that has allowed us to create consensus in our national and global dialogue, and is useful and instructive for that purpose. While it promotes certain global paradigms that we deplore- such as big, exploitative development- it may also hold the key to finding global solutions in a consensual fashion. Of course, this is only an opinion.
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Aparna Krishnan sure. but till you level the field, may we have reservations ?
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Sailesh Bhupalam i don't think the field can ever be levelled, we want treat people equally, and that's noble. But to want to make them equals is naive. But that doesn't stop us from trying. So reservations should always be there, but should change according to the times, about who should get the benefit.
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 Aparna Krishnan english brings a caste system with it. that is unacceptable. and my child has a huge edge over other village children with english (as opposed to telugu), and that is also unacceptablr. Sure, give them all equal access to english, and snglish books, and english milieu to enable them. Till you manage that, may be ask for all langiuages to carry equal weight.
 Sailesh Bhupalam how is that possible? we can't jump from nobody knowing a language to everybody knowing a language. We should either chose justice in procedure or outcomes, to have both is sometimes not possible.
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 Gayathri Nair Is a dilution of quality in our best services and educational institutions consistent with the objective of social upliftment? My own answer is that it is not the best answer. I am not against reservation, but I am not convinced that it is the best sol...See more
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 Aparna Krishnan The Great National Merit is a poor second to Justice. Imho.
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 Gayathri Nair The questions of merit and justice are not unallied. The poor that we uplift will eventually grow to benefit from the merit of the institutions that they gain access to through the privileges that they have been conferred. I think that we, the privileged sections of society, though mostly thoughtless beneficiaries, are not evil, we are as ordinary as the underprivileged who were left behind by circumstances of birth. In seeking to uplift the poor, I see no need to punish the privileged or deny them the quality of service that they are entitled to for being the greater contributors of wealth to the maintenance of those services. In other words, I don't believe there need be any conflict of interest between merit in our social institutions and services and social upliftment, provided that we can contrive sensible schemes to empower the disprivileged with authentic upliftment, than mere entry to positions that hitherto demanded greater merit.
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 Aparna Krishnan The poor and hardworking and most capable. yes, there is no difference between Merit and Justice. TN proves it by its substantial reservations on one side, and the development indices on the other !!
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Sailesh Bhupalam We take values like justice and merit for granted and think everybody has same priorities as us. We should question the merit of each value. We don't just learn calculus or wordsworth's poems in schools, we learn this too. 

merit will increase social utility, which is then distributed among the society. So, efficient organisations means more success, economically and otherwise, In research institutions and companies that produce wealth, there are no reservations and utility is produced well. the whole society by that logic should have more of everything, right? Not so. 

Justice is about how that utility produced is utilized. If we have only merit in recruiting people who distribute social utility, their values, their biases, their upbringing will decide who should get what. But if we have justice and a representative system, then we have a balance because there are people from all sections deciding who should get what, it might still not be perfect but it's better than before. 

That's what we have, no? Reservations in government, merit in private enterprise.
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Aseem Chawla And all this exchange of wonderful ideas in English! Exceptional!! 
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Aparna Krishnan Aseem we live in contradictions. That is our baggage, and I have faced it for what it is !
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Aseem Chawla You really think that I don't know that Aparna... now don't you... 
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Suja Swaminathan Aparna, when we look for solutions, it's imperative that we take everyone along. Even the English wallahs. Otherwise the oppression merely shifts spaces. As someone who grew up all over the country, I lost touch with my both by cultural roots and my mother tongue. But felt enriched by the Rajasthani folk songs, Punjabi language or Hindi literature that came my way. It feels as if language is incidental. Essence - of humanity, connection, understanding seems more important. Secondly, it takes time for ones ideas and reality to come together if one were asked to prove how commuted are you towards principles of social justice and egalitarian society. Be hardly made a dent. But I sense many of my future decisions and choices hinging upon it. 
For now, I read you with lot of interest.
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Aparna Krishnan Language sadly is not an isolated fact. Nor is clothing. Nor lifestyle. Each is political, and thereby we indicate with whom we choose to cast our lot, and loyalties, and struggles.
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Aparna Krishnan And English-fluency gives an edge amd power which Telugu-fluency does not. Therein lies the casteism.
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Vijayvithal Jahagirdar I doubt outlawing English will do much, Even if by some magic every school shifted to Kannada, the question is which Kannada? The Kannada of Bangalore is very different that that of bijapur or yadgiri, to such an extent that a bangalorean cannot understand the other party and vice versa. 
Aparna Krishnan decentralize ! there is no other way of giving justice and opportunity.
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Aseem Chawla Panchayati Raaj?
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Aparna Krishnan yes. in all senses.
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Aseem Chawla Gandhij's dream... It'll come... will take time...
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Aparna Krishnan well, by then there will be no soul left in the village, the way village economies and livlihoods are breaking down.
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Aseem Chawla It may come sooner than later... I've been surprised before... all that is needed is the critical mass for it to happen...
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Aparna Krishnan i know. futures are unpredictable. and we need to hope.
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Aseem Chawla Glass is half full Aparna...
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Aparna Krishnan thanks for a boost when i need it !
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Zulfi Haider Government schools? what la la land do you live in? The prevlidged send their children to private schools, even the poor do the same.....only the poorest with no option send their kids to govt schools (with the exception on Kendriya vidyala and Navodayschools). Do i need to inform you why? While that said, it is an interesting idea to level the laying field for all. What about another way, ensuring that Govt schools ALSO RUN, THAT TEACHERS ACTUALLY COME AND TEACH, AND THAT THE VILLAGE CHILDREN ARE ALSO TAUGHT ENGLIGH, AND NOT FORCED TO BEAR THE BURDEN OF NATIONALISM BY BEING TAUGHT HINDI ONLY AND VERNACULAR LANGUAGE.
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Aparna Krishnan baap re ! chillathe kyon ho ?
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Aparna Krishnan i am simply mentioning a dream. That were english to disappear, much of our inherited privilege would vanish. To make english the aspirational thing is to give all the village children a permement handicap. Anyway that is where things are - and yes, please make the govt schools function ! we have given enough complaints to the collector, got teachers posted out etc while turiya was in the school. now we are not parents of the school, and i tell the other nothers to fight the fight. but you and i know the state of the schools, and how its only going downhill as is every other government deliverable to the common people. i have no answers at all, nor am i pretending to have any. so dont SCREAM at me Zulfi !! 
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