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‘Arcot Easwaran has claimed that when the whole world is switching over to English, Mr. Vajpayee has shown disrespect to it by addressing the U.N. in Hindi. Leaders of many countries such as China, Japan, Russia, France, Germany and Spain address the international forums in their own national language. Do they all disrespect English by doing so?’
Oct 1, 2003, The Hindu.
What’s this obsession amongst us that we have to use English to sound cool or sound “sophisticated”? Why do we have such prejudices against people who cannot communicate effectively in English and have to resort to Hindi to get their point across? If our mother tongue is Hindi, we should use it to communicate not just at home but at other places as well.
The introduction of English to the Indian linguistic landscape opened with the dawn of the British colonial era. English began to develop roots in Indian education. A blueprint for India’s educational policy was laid down in Lord Macaulay’s minutes (Feb. 2, 1835). Macaulay stated the mission for the British Raj, to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and intellect.”
I sometimes wonder what language Indians will be speaking 50 years on. Looking beyond the horizon of current events, two trends look likely to dominate our linguistic future. One, a rapid spread of English across India, including the aspiring lower middle-classes; the second – the unprecedented popularity of Hindi, even in the South, thanks to blockbuster Hindi movies and the universal appeal of Hindi TV programs like Indian Idol and Kaun Banega Crorepati.
The brain of an average Indian is divided into two parts, the first part is obsessed with marks and the second is obsessed with English. We form impressions of people on how well they speak English, and if a person talks in an American accent then he or she is the cream of the crop.
I’m not denying it, I fall under the same category, but what I wonder it is so. Hindi is our national language and much more difficult than English any day (that is why I stopped studying it). Then, why do we just classify people who communicate in Hindi equivalent to people who are illiterate? It’s the most embarrassing thing in the world and I guess this happens only in India!
At the intersection of these two trends is the fashionable collision of two languages. Hinglish, the aspirational language of the lower and middle middle-classes and the fashionable language of drawing rooms of the upper and upper middle-classes. Similar attempts in the past were considered downmarket, contemptuously put down by snobbish brown sahibs. This time, it’s in. some examples: ‘Life ho to aise’, ‘Josh machine’, and ‘Dil mange more’. Radio has found the same adoring response to ‘Hello hi, aaye hai!'
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