English !

If vernacular languages can have as much value in our sad, colonised land, as English does, our village children would have a better chance in their struggles.

Niw, at start, they are defeated. Unable to really undersdtand those texts, unable to defend themselves in English in any interview ... lost to a country enslaved to the English language.

 

• Venkatesh Srinivasan

  Very true! This is a huge issue! The solution is not teaching the 95 percent English but giving indigenous languages the importance they deserve. Who will bell the cat?

Were English to suddenly disappear then my Sasi and my Redima and my Munendra will come into their own, because their essential strengths, intellectual and field based, are vaster to those of our progeny. And yet we will never allow that - and we will give every intellectual logic to defend that position - because our own superiority, and the inherited assests of our children, are dependent on the implicit superiority of English.

We will tell the Sasis also 'to learn english', and enable than - knowing deep within that they will be only also-rans here - and clerks to the sahibhood our children will inherit. If this sounds bitter, yes, it is. I see whole communities of bright sparks being extinguished as we the elite pursue our hidden agendas of social dominance, cloaked in well meaning NGO phrasologies of Schooling. Only Local Language Dominance can recover space for all the Sasis. Hang our global edge, first let the village people eat to full stomachs.

• Jataayu B'luru

  // Local Language Dominance // Lets first have *equal* opportunities for people educated in their native Indian languages. In many urban centers, even simple jobs like billing counter clerks, waiter at restaurant etc. ask for 'English speaking skills' as may customers speak English by default, and not the local language. A sad reality

  

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• Prakash Thangavel

  In Chennai sub urb apt, my wife's friend is working as tamil teacher, to get urban tamil kids familiarized in tamil. All these kids study in schools asking for fees in lakhs and churning out kids with half baked knowledge about everything except their mother tongue..

  

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  • Aparna Krishnan

    and such will lead this country tomorrow. i hope they all go away to america !

    

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  • Aparna Krishnan

    And some schools try to be 'alternative' and 'sensitize' these uprooted specimens. First they need to talk the local language and wear local clothing !

    

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• దామోదర రెడ్డి

  At least till 10th class it IS essential to study in mother tongue. otherwise what is the need of so called education? just by hearting some random eng paragraphs?? they cannot think, or explore.. and their ideas, values all are shrinken. and became some immature cool dudes. No. till 10th it is mother tongue ,, must. learning yet another lang in parallel is not a problem... i too expeienced it. unfortunately what BJP is doing in states like goa, is suppressing native langs, and spreading use of english, and make them hybrids. already andhra is getting destroyed.. every idiot try to pose as he don't know telugu much (Sick!!) ...

  

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• దామోదర రెడ్డి

  I strongly wish manohar parikar, or some one from RSS take over bjp govt in goa... instead sangh thrown out Subhash Velingkar for rebelling over bjp for this cause ,to avoid rifts with bjp. it's high time they should cross political correctness.... already goa half destroyed by missionary schools, and their NGOs... now towards complete annihilation of native culture.

There are families where the parents and children converse in English. In India !

Zulfi Haider What is this roots and identity that you are talking about? Isn't it good that people grow up with more fluid sense of identity. That said.....I find it disturbing that parents who share a common language only speak in English with their kids.

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Aparna Krishnan My point is your second point Zulfi.

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Aparna Krishnan As to the first, Gandhi said it better than I can, "“I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the culture of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any”. And to not be blown off, one needs roots :)

Dola Dasgupta We do too...but we are multilingual...we can all speak atleast four languages..

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Dola Dasgupta English is now an Indian language..just as Urdu is..India is not just a geographical landmass like other nations. India is an organic evolving idea of human civilization. It is an absorbing organism. Not a fixed idea..It is an ancient civilization, a container/cauldron for cultural, religious, social, historical, spiritual, literary, musical alchemy. So I don't really get what you are indicating through your post. To me it sounds like misplaced sarcasm...

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Shyamala Sanyal replied · 1 Reply

Aparna Krishnan English is not 'just a language', sorry.

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Vishwanath GR This is a sad thread. The conquered taking pride in their being colonized, and attributing it to their "dynamic , evolving, all-absorbing culture".

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Write a reply...

Aparna Krishnan It is a status symbol. And communication in English alienates from India in many many ways.

Dola Dasgupta I find your commentary on English language very prejudiced. Every day you use this language to communicate your experiments and explorations, to post on social media, by the dozens. And yet you seem to deny it's effectiveness as a language. This denial of our past to create a romantic idea of how the present should be is flawed. The acceptance of our past unconditionally as an evolving civilization, is according to me, pertinent to flow in the present. When I read such commentary, I find no difference between the commentator and other bigots who are constantly creating and making decisive moral rules for India. I am proud to be an Indian, not because of the intolerant bigoted ideas of a few, but because of its tolerant, humble heart of welcoming and making one's own everything that is considered 'foreign or alien'. Very few on the world can claim to know and speak more than one language or even two, as do Indians.

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Sunitha Choudhry Well said.

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Manoj Singhvi Awesomely put . If we go into the origin of vegetables we have , more insights will be gained of what is local and what is foreign . Unknowingly we are hypocrites . Our roots then should be of Hunter gatherers.

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Arun K. Shanker Nicely written, the thing is that we are all Out of Africa, there is also this thing about which language we think in, I sometimes think in many languages. Also there is research that relate multilingualism and the mastery of complex processes of thought that can put people in advantage. These include learning in general, complex thinking and creativity, mental flexibility, interpersonal and communication skills. It is also known help in in handling complex and demanding problem-solving tasks when compared to monolinguals.

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Vishwanath GR It bothers me that we could ignore the brutality of British rule and eagerly take up their language. English s not just another language, other languages gradually decline even as we smugly congratulate our openness

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Aparna Krishnan Vishwanath GR the privilege that english gives us the elite is so vast, that we do not even want to face it. we would rather stay secure and privileged in our ivory towers intellectualizing. sad, very sad.

Sunitha Choudhry What is wrong with that? We speak Hindi and Tamil at home and English generally. I don't regard it as a status symbol. And the fluidity in 3 languages is great. Why this sudden positioning to equate English with status? This perverse desire to establish English as "foreign" is another form of faux Indian pride.

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Vishwanath GR I would rather be a little "proud" than forget the havoc that colonialism inflicted on us. Educated Indians wanna show of their openness at every turn, all they do is show that they really studied history at all. The blood and suffering of their ancestors means little to them.

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Sunitha Choudhry Vishwanath GR I have no control over what my ancestors did or didn't do. I would rather look forward constructively than look back regretfully when all I have is now and nothing more. Blood continues to flow at the mercy of capitalist nations including ours.

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Vidyasankar Sundaresan Way to miss the forest for the trees, guys! (Dola,.Jithin, etc)

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Aparna Krishnan Its deeper. By missing it, one can hold onto the inherited privileges with a clean concsience.

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Vidyasankar Sundaresan What privilege? Don't you know that only brahmin men have privilege in India, Aparna Krishnan? ;) Everybody else, from Devyani Khobragade to Narendra Modi, never had any privilege.

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Aparna Krishnan I have no more hope from this modern-liberal-intellectual class. I am waiting from the common people, grounded and rooted, to come into their own.

 

• There seems an unsaid understanding that English is superior, both parties seem to agree - the ones who think they are above, and the ones who think they are below.

  Some friends from Thailand had once come to stay, they spoke broken English with gusto and confidence. I could barely make anything of it in the beginning but it did not deter them. Their confidence came from the fact that they were proficient in their own language English was only to communicate with us here. 
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    Aparna Krishnan

    We have broken our people with the supremacy we have granted to the white man's language on our soil. I think it is not innocent - that is what establishes our supremacy over the people of this land. Our only real strength is fluency in English - most of us have little else.

    

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    Aparna Krishnan

    So Thais are not as mentally enslaved as us. Interesting. I wonder why and how.

    

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• Sethuraman Pasupathy

  The language which rules the world ( power ) is English for the last few centuries. In the process english has become a connecting language for the world and is likely to remain so. Feeling inferior or superior comes from the strength of our culture. Having been colonized we have lost our confidence. China was not colonized ,so they have retained their confidence.