I had been to Adyar Sangeetha recently, and I noticed a couple (colleagues) who had come for lunch. Both of them were from Inautix – their tags on their neck showed it. I really wonder why people carry their office tag to each and every place they go. Wearing it during office hours is fine, but to the shopping mall in the evenings? I am sure they at least remove it when having sex with their spouses.
The restaurant was crowded and the server wasn’t able to find a place for them. The young chap pulled a chair, and shared a table with another set of people. With pride he said to the attendant, “processes have to be thinked.” He surely was a Tamilian, and also the server. In that case what was the need to use a foreign language for communication? And that too wrong English? (I am sure after reading the headline you already had thought about sending me a mail or leaving me a comment to change it to ‘thought’). Had the attendant knew English, I am sure he wouldn’t be serving masala dosas & idlis to the customers.
We as Indians tend to give a lot of importance to foreign languages at the cost of regional, and I have seen it predominant in the South. In the North, people start off with English, and midway shift to Hindi. But in the South, language seems to show a class difference. The one who knows English tries to behave more sophisticated than the rest. People even tend to carry huge complexes about not having fluency in English. It is ultimately your thoughts that matter & not your vocabulary.
May be it all started from the day when India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru gave his first Independence day’s speech in English, and not in an Indian language. He would have had his own reasons, of course. May be he was trying too hard to impress Mrs Mountbatten.
English of course is important, but it should come last in the list of languages we know. First any Indian should be made thorough in his regional language, then probably a national language & then a foreign language. There may be thoughts that this might retard our growth as a developing country – but Japan became one of the developed countries without using a foreign language. And if you want to work in Japan – you should know to converse in Japanese.
And why a regional language is important than a national language? Most regional languages (like that of Marathi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Malayalam) of India has rich heritage, unlike Hindi – which was in fact formed only in the year 1935 (refer Hindi Sahitya Ki Itihaas – by Ramchandra Shukla). And Mahatma Gandhi never wanted Hindi to be a national language – he wanted Hindustani, which is a mixture of Urdu & one of the dialects of Hindi.
If we don’t put efforts to save our regional languages now, it will die soon. Maharashtra is the best example for this. The whole of Marathi filmdom had to bring their shutters down, as Hindi became a prime language and Hindi movies became the prime focus.
Enna solrathu sariya? Kya mein theek hoon? Am I right?