Tongue twist of fate

Yes, there are two Indias. No, ruling classes won't admit English can join
the two If parents wish their children to study in English medium schools,
then should not the state make this available to its poorer citizens? Or in
a new version of our very ancient caste system are we reserving this only
for the chosen twice-born?
 JAITHIRTH RAO

T HE familiar adage is that there are many Indias. Given our ancient Indic
obsession with pairs of opposites, our academic and popular journals are
full of bi-polar descriptions. Rich vs. poor, rural vs. urban, Bangalore's
silicon plateau vs. Bihar's badlands, Gurgaon's sleek shopping malls
(islands of consumerism) vs. Vidarbha's crop-less farms (islands of death),
soaring stock markets vs. barefoot children, spiralling real estate values
vs. horror-stricken slums, new-found materialism vs. eternal spiritual
values... the list goes on.

I'd like to make my wise sage-like contribution to this litany. We have two
labour markets. One where wages increase at double digit rates, where
mobility is the name of the game (if you don't switch jobs every year there
is something wrong with you), where resumes gain in value each month, where
placement agencies make a fortune. The other where joblessness is an endless
fate, where years of despair pass you by as you keep waiting for a job that
never turns up and you fill your life with inane activity, not with fruitful
employment, an environment where real incomes shrink, savings erode and
where you are left as a mere spectator watching the 'other' India pass you
by.

There is only one differentiator between the two worlds: knowledge of
English or lack thereof. You may have flunked high school, but if your
English is passable, you are on to the ladder of upward mobility. You may
have a master's degree or even a doctorate, but if your English is poor or
non-existent you are for all practical purposes excluded from the 'shining'
India. Even more than engineering degrees or MBAs, the English language is
the great divider.

And all of us know this in our heart of hearts. Pandit Nehru's grandchildren
and great-grandchildren attended English medium schools, as do those of most
leaders. Vociferous adherents of Hindutva and Marxutva are great patrons of
the much maligned missionary schools and foreign institutions when it comes
to their own children. Where is the elementary justice, let alone the logic
of arguing that English is good for 'our' children but not good enough for
the children of 'others' - for the children of our servants and our
ever-present poor. Everyone gets it; the poor get it, their children get it
and yet we carry on with this charade that what is obvious to all is not the
basis of public policy.

A friend of mine runs an NGO in Bombay (sorry Mumbai!) in the field of
education. She recounts the story of how she went up to some street children
and asked them if they would come and live with her. They would have
shelter, comforts and education. The literally streetsmart children told her
that they were happy as they were. In an inspired moment, she offered to
teach them English. The children's eyes lit up. Their enthusiasm was
tremendous. If it was English that she was going to teach them, they were
willing to join up in droves.

The basic common sense that these lost children of urban India could summon, is denied to our honourable ministers, secretaries, joint secretaries, commissioners and commissars! Irrespective of how we got it, we cannot be so foolish as to oppose something so patently
desirable, even necessary. With due respect, the idea that all the research
journals in the fields of molecular biology or chip design can be translated
in a timely manner into Oriya or Assamese or Konkani each year is not a
practical proposition. To use examples of Japan or France or even China is
an exercise in pointlessness. All these countries vigorously promote English
as a second language (even the French despite their posturing). They all
have one language, not sixteen! At most, they have to translate once.

 Our friendly comrades of China of the Marxutvic persuasion have forced (that's
right forced!) Mandarin as the one language of their empire. We neither can
nor should do this. Why not simply give people a choice? If parents wish
their children to study in English medium schools, then should not the state
make this available to its poorer citizens? Or in a new version of our very
ancient caste system are we reserving this only for the chosen twice-born?
English, one might add is more than just about economic opportunities or
jobs. It is about a weltanschauung. Indian languages do not have an
appropriate expression for 'equality'. Equality before law or before God is
simply alien to our casteridden hierarchical traditions.

If we can learn and adopt the principle of equality (as indeed we must), why should we resent the medium through which this idea is presented? My subaltern scholar
friends should note that English does not have equivalents for expressions
like 'ritual pollution', 'jhootha' etc, which may be, just may be, why our
'traditional' ideas suppressed the individual and prevented the emergence of
prosperity.

A Middle-eastern friend was lamenting that they have been driven into an
intellectual blind alley because they are stuck with medieval Arabic, which
determines their mindset. (Incidentally, their plight is really bad. More
books are translated into Spanish in one year than into Arabic in a couple
of hundred years!). They are literally trapped in the language of real and
imagined pasts. The very idea of progress becomes impossible.

We can of course choose to imitate our pragmatic Chinese comrades who have
mandated that every Beijing taxi-driver will speak English before the 2008
Olympics or we can take the Middle East as our source of inspiration.
Incidentally, one can argue that the market has made its choices. The
Chinese government is using Indian companies to teach English to Chinese
citizens. And in India, anyone who can remotely afford it is sending their
children to English medium schools. One can only plead with our socialistic
leaders that they should do for the children of the poor what they do for
their own children. Then automatically, the two dichotomous labour markets
merge into one. Is this too much to ask of our leaders?
The writer is chairman and CEO, Mphasis jerry.rao@expressindia.com

EMAIL
jerry.rao@expressindia.com

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