Now that we have this hostility to English as a language in India, soon, very soon, English will be a mark against you socially and we will explode our bridges over the rivers of the world and isolate ourselves because, like it or not, English as we have reworked it is our strength.
What I want to do is conduct a survey. Of all the Members of Parliament and every MLA in India’s states who sits and pontificates in the Assembly. And I want to make a list of all their children and all their siblings (that is brothers and sisters) and then count them up to what would be about 20,000 to 30,000 people, give or take a few.
Then I want the Home Ministry to release in the interest of the public which schools they go to and how many of them are in non-English medium schools. If we get 5% going to Hindi,Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, any of the state languages, I will be surprised.
It is nice to be populist and I don’t say that English is better than any other language but it is a potent weapon and now it is our language and as Indian as anything else. I just want to know if these politicians if they have put their actions where their mouths are…is that an expression. It kind of makes you hypocritical to go screaming about the place when baba and baby are studying clause analysis and reading up the Essays of Elia.
Don’t you think it would be worth finding out from the ‘Patshala’ brigade if they really opt for it.
DOWN WITH ENGLISH!
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DAILY DOSE By Bikram Vohra