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 caste-ridden 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?

... contd.