Monday, 13 November 2017

English, our passport to Dominating

Were English to lose its primacy, many of us would be stranded.

Many of us have few skills apart from a stake in a snob language.

And we would see every ordinary Indian coming into his own. Their intelligence, application, skill set is as vast and vaster than ours.
But we will never permit that.

Gangadharan Kumar Forget English losing its primacy. Even if "accented" English is treated on par that will be a big first step.
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Aparna Krishnan
Aparna Krishnan No. Its all or none. English has to go.
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Aparna Krishnan
Aparna Krishnan Who knows when the wind will blow differently. History has served hard lesson many a time.
 
Alka Ranjan Agree - completely. By attaching so much importance to the language, we have robbed people their confidence to be.
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Gopal Krishna Iyer
Gopal Krishna Iyer Aparna Krishnan do not forget this language is a medium of communication of people n our country too.If you write in Telugu in FB except people knowing Telugu will understand.. What about me or others!
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Sridhar Lakshmanan
Sridhar Lakshmanan even now as she writes in english more people wont be able to read and understand compared to those who will understand if she wrote in telugu, in an indian context of course
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Sridhar Lakshmanan
Sridhar Lakshmanan that was a response to above but there is truth and it applies to me too..
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Aparna Krishnan
Aparna Krishnan i respond to that fact which i see in myself. This is a problem we all need to face head on - as we are part of the problem we decry. A friend 20 years ago demanded that we all speak only in Telugu. As seen today, it was a failed beginning.
 
Mark Johnston Much as I'd dearly like to see most people in Scotland using Scots and Gaelic without prejudice as was the case before we were betrayed by our royals and politicians into becoming a subservient part of the London centric shamefull British Empire I think the colonialisation has a much deeper hold on us than the enforced use of the English language. If I believed changing the dominant language could stop us being run by centralising and corrupt 'elite' politicians addicted to increasing their personal wealth and power and the dangerous myth of ever growing economies in a finite world and instead made us, as a society, less selfish and greedy and more outward looking I would throw more of my weight behind attempts to change it. I'm not making any claims for the different situation in India just reflecting how I see our own unfortunate experience.
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Aparna Krishnan
Aparna Krishnan meaning there you do not see the politics of language that central. Here in India the English language, elitism, dominant ideology all go together.
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Mark Johnston
Mark Johnston I feel, for us, perhaps the loss of primacy of our languages is a symptom not a cause of our subservience. There are language activists who feel differently and reclaiming language was at the forefront of the Scottish renaissance which led to a growing pride in our culture and our still growing movement for independence.
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Gopal Krishna Iyer
Gopal Krishna Iyer Whatever you may say English stays as Universal language and understood by most people on the globe.
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Rajesh Pandey
Rajesh Pandey Gopal Krishna Iyer ji, you are absolutely right. But, for communicating within a state, shouldn't our own Indian languages be preferred, without attaching any inferiority complex to them ?
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Gopal Krishna Iyer
Gopal Krishna Iyer Which language you will speak down south or North East.
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Rajesh Pandey
Rajesh Pandey Telugu in A.P. and Telangana, Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala and Kannada in Karnataka. What is the difficulty ? Please elaborate.
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Gopal Krishna Iyer
Gopal Krishna Iyer Tell me how people would communicate with them.They understand English to some extent though Hindi is catching up now.I was interacting with people in North East. Hindi is not understood though they are OK with English.
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Rajesh Pandey
Rajesh Pandey Oh, you are talking of outsiders communicating with locals. That is accepted. We need a common language for that, unless the outsider is living long enough to pick up the local language.
My point is should locals communicate amongst themselves in English, merely due to the sense of superiority attached to English ?

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