Lingua Franca

The exam season had arrived along with the festival of light. What a confluence of events. Whether to devour the array of sweets in the palate or imbibe few more words into my biological CPU was the question I was asking myself. My insatiable gourmet desire emerged as the final winner. While I was lavishing on those sweets a question had risen in my mind. Why are people who aspire to enter the top colleges in India being tested for their ability in English? Doesn’t make any sense! Not that I am educated but even to a neophyte this would sound a little weird.

So much importance given to a language, which was derived from Greek, Latin and many other languages. I started to wonder if institutes in China, Korea, Italy, France etc were also following the same practice. Out of curiosity I did a search in the internet and found out that the majority of them don’t even use English as a medium to teach.

There is a process of factionalism happening in urban India, people who know to speak English and people who don’t. I recently came across an article in “The Hindu” wherein a school was imposing exorbitant fine on students who weren’t communicating in English. In fact this was the same situation in my school when I was studying. And am sure this would be the same across many schools in India. Kids get chastised for talking in their mother-tongue. At such a tender age this practice might develop a sense of aversion towards their mother-tongue. I had an aversion when I was callow. I used to feel chagrin whenever I told people that so and so language was my mother-tongue.

People look at others superciliously when they don’t use English at workplaces, schools, colleges, restaurants, family congregations etc. Pity the souls who find it difficult to converse eloquently in English because they’ll have to deal with disparity wherever they go. A sense of inferiority complex develops within them and they start questioning their own potential. They are pushed to the so called tier-2 status in the society.

Families are slowly shifting towards using English permanently at home. Parents want their off-springs to use only English and they are ready to go to any extent to implement this. Students who come from a rural background and non-English medium background find it difficult and even thwarting to face their competitors in cities.

We’ve gone to the summit of credulousness that English is now revered as a token of knowledge and not just another language. We’ve started believing that it is not just another tool to communicate but a tool to stamp our ascendancy on the ingenuous. Youths have started to feel abashed to use their mother-tongue in front of strangers for the fear that he might think him to be archaic and take him for granted. Higher officials in organizations have started to circumspect the ability of an employee who doesn’t know or who has minimal fluency in English. Whenever we meet a doctor, a lawyer or any bureaucrat we try to stick to English.

It’s so bemusing to understand why people feel at ease to interpret something in a language which is not aboriginal to them. Won’t it be even better if the same is done with our own mother-tongue? Not to take away any respect from the beautiful language of the Shakespeare’s and the Milton’s, but we’ve our own stalwarts like Khalidas, Valmiki, and Thiruvalluvar to name a few. Am not saying that we should start using only Sanskrit and chaste Tamil but we at least can try not to hide the fact that our mother-tongue is Hindi or Tamil or Kannada et al which have their origins long before English even saw its infancy. We needn’t force our kids to use their mother-tongue, but we can at least try to stop them from feeling that using one’s mother-tongue is an act of shame. English is a universal language but it’s not the only language of the knowledgeable and the intellectuals. Let us try not to belittle our mother-tongue each one of which has a rich history behind it.