Other Serious Losses Due to Keeping all Eggs in the English Basket
Due to the impelling commercial necessities, almost all countries of the world are presently engaged in learning the languages of other countries. But, we keep moon walking in the English cemetery, day and night. We are not paying any attention to need for learning of other languages. Due to this, we are suffering great economic and commercial losses. We will be left in complete isolation in the near future if we didn’t learn the languages of other countries. Today, Chinese and Spanish should be more important to us than English. But we are completely blind not only to the near future but to the present as well. The English is being phased out throughout the world of all the mother tongue domains, which it had occupied earlier. But we are increasingly handing over all our education, culture and communication spaces to the English language. A cursory look at the decreasing Indian share in the world trade should be enough to know how much it has benefitted us. In 1950, the Indian share in world trade was 1.78 per cent. It has now come down to 1.50 per cent. The increase in the spread of English in India during these years is pretty obvious to all ones. This constant decrease in India’s share in the world trade tells that the Indian policy makers’ English ride is a fine children’s story of ‘one eyed mare and the blind rider’ (kaani ghoRi andha svaar). A few days back, the honourable minister Mr. Shashi Tharoor, of UNO fame, had stated that English was the key to India’s progress. Had he read some UNO document on language, while he was at the UNO at least, he would have never said that. But why should an Indian minister read when illiteracy pays better dividends!
Less said the better about the cultural losses the English language has caused us and still continues to cause increasingly. A farmyard generation is being raised, a generation who neither have any intimate connection with their language, literature, culture, history, religion, knowledge or even science and nor they can have any deep sensibility for higher artistic creation or appreciation. The Indian elite who flirted with the Persian language were called ‘malechhas’ (the fallen one) by Baba Nanak at that time. Now, when the present Indian elite had buried even Baba Nanak’s message deep, who will listen to Gandhi Mahatma. He wore ‘dhoti’ only. The things would have been different had he pronounced Bye-Bye to Indian culture and worn tie-vie.
Joga Singh, Ph.D. (York, U.K.), Mobile: +91-9915709582; E-mail: jogasinghvirk@yahoo.co