All this controversy about Goan Government’s decision to give grants only to English medium primary schools, and the ongoing fallout has my head spinning.
I could never in a zillion years imagine MY parents supporting me, leave alone joining me, in boycotting classes and demonstrating outside my school, no matter what language I protested for. What a thrashing I would have got had I even broached the subject. Leaves me wondering what namby-pamby parents kids are inheriting nowadays.
But I agree it is important to learn English and maybe Bollywood aspirants from the Tiatr companies need to brush up on their Hindi as well, because, let’s face it, on the World Stage of Opportunity neither Konkani nor Marathi is going to bring home the lolly.
Foreigners who visit Goa for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the past 50 years since Liberation, many local citizens still converse in pidgin Portuguese. However Russian tourists who arrive in Goa are thrilled that their cab driver and guides are extremely fluent in Russian, and know exactly how many rubles buy a shot of vodka.
Oh, sure quite a few Goans speak a modicum of Hindi but usually just barely enough to land a job as head-waiter at a beach shack. And there are some who know the English alphabet, which just about allows them to read the labels on alcohol bottles.
This leads to problems for the rest of India and the world, firstly when the domestic tourist needs to obtain important information from them, such as, “Nangae logon ka beach kahaan hain?” (Where is the beach with the naked people) or the international traveler who asks, “Say dude, where can I score some primo weed?”
To their credit some countries such as the USA have made a sincere effort to adopt English as their native language. But even there you have problems.
Travelling around California which is possibly the most linguistically deformed area in the US (maybe because the Latin-Americans there consider marijuana their staple diet) I found that Americans seem to have misplaced the letter “O” and lost their “T’s” altogether.
I mean listen to them when they tell you they like their “cahfee hahd and sweed” and their “bahdled wahder cold” and you’ll know what I mean. When I pointed this out they sounded very apologetic and “sahree” when they told me that quite a few “G’s” too had “gahn missin’.”
So if any of my ardent readers have extra alphabets that you no longer need, and need to free up some closet space, please send them to: Alphabets R Us, Secretary of State for Linguistics, USA.
But the point that I and the Goan government is trying to make here is that the rest of the world seems to be taking its own sweet time to learn English, except for China. So in the interest of combating terrorism and improving customer relations with Pakistan, it’s up to Goans to put the bull to the grindstone and seize the horns of the day and show India how to learn English. If virtual monkeys can do it then why can’t we?
As a nation we are not strong in this area: A recent poll showed that although India has 29 languages and 1600 dialects, 92% of Indians living in India and abroad speak no foreign language at all. The same census showed that 95% also cannot speak English and 59% cannot speak Hindi, 80% cannot name the village they live in, and 76% believe that the Himalayas are covered in vanilla ice cream.
So you can see that education in India is going to be an uphill task here in the sense that Indians, are forever going to be linguistically challenged. C’mon, let’s face it, this is why the Chinese are capable of hosting the Olympic games, whereas we view just getting Mr. Kalmadi into prison a major achievement.
So,let’s stop blaming the education system for the fact that we score lower on IQ tests than the Chinese, the Koreans or the Japanese, and maybe a few other vertebrate life forms on the planet! This is nothing to be ashamed of, Indians! Say it out loud! “We are like this only!” See? Doesn’t that feel good?
And… let’s stop whining, feeling sorry for ourselves and crying in anguish over the fact that the Central Minister in charge of human resources, has a multiple personality disorder with a matching surname that sounds like “Sybil”.
Remember: We still have nuclear weapons. Hee hee!
But to get back to the point of discussion, we should all learn to speak English, and maybe understand the local language of the state where we plan to live and work.
HOW TO LEARN ANOTHER LANGUAGE:
The key to understanding how most people communicate is to know what is meant by an “idiomatic expression” of which some examples are:
ENGLISH: “Watch it buster!” (“Sumbuddy is gonna get hurt!”)
HINDI: “Teri maa ki!” (“Sumbuddy and their mother is gonna get hurt!”) Although some Australian cricketers think this refers to their simian ancestry.
KONKANI: “Aae! Jeeb Sambhaal!” (“Look! Let’s discuss this! And maybe no one will get hurt.”) One of those namby pamby parents maybe?
TAMLISH:
Also when speaking Hindi, always remember, that for some strange reason everyday actions and groceries are “masculine” or “feminine” depending on who is referring to whom. Dogs for example are usually masculine, even if they are not, and wild animals like the elephant are masculine. (This does not mean, by the way, that a dog will not try to hump an elephant’s leg, it probably will.)
If you land up speaking Hindi in Kashmir, at certain points during each sentence you should give the impression that you are about to hawk up a major gob of phlegm.
Ok? Practice speaking English, in front of a mirror or with someone who speaks it fluently until you feel comfortable, then go to a country whose lingua franca is English and try to achieve world peace and international understanding, the way Zail Singh did during his Presidential visit to Britain, when; while the Queen was feeding the Royal swans, he said that he was, “extremely pleased to be admiring her bathaks.”
