Dilemma of Little Hearts

       ‘He is our Sharukh Khan, he wants to become a Bollywood actor’, said one of  the school boys whom I got acquainted with during my idle walks at Delhi’s Caunaut Place, pointing at the Sharukhan look alike boy among them. He had smiled  through his glittering eyes when I told him that I would like to see him on big screen one day. Yet the boys didn’t seem confident about their dream, when I asked about their school they were so reluctant to name it rather put it this way, ‘We study in a bad school’,  upon my persuation they told me that they study in a government school and  were so weak in English.

       This boys represent an India that is under confident and disadvantaged in job market in an opportunity-starving country due to their lack of English language skill. I can connect to the dilemma of the boys well as I was a product of a government school where my medium of education was Malayalam(my mother tongue).There was no English medium school in my village at that time, so that I had studied in a government school and passed out my secondary school with little or no English language skill.And  it was a Himalayan task for me to understand the lessons at the next level of my education where medium of education was English and I was terribly under confident.

          English is the new aristocracy in India and  unfortunately class-conscious Bollywood industry  requires convent educated actors and actresses though Hindi is the language, they would prefer to tutor an English speaking person in Hindi than experimenting with a Hindi speaking(non English speaking) girl/boy, obviously talent is the last thing on their mind.Most of the Bollywood actress’ are city bred middle or upper middle class girls who have the right English  accent to join the elite club of celebrities, though  actors like Irfan Khan,Nawayuddin Siddiqui etc are  certain exception to this rule.

       English fetches respect in India, and more opportunity in the job market, but a great majority cannot afford education in private English medium schools, thus our education institutions produce two kinds of citizens, privileged and less privileged or to put it another way, English medium educated and non English medium educated, the latter definitely is lacking resources and confidence. The commercialization of education with the mushrooming  private schools, has  negatively impacted public schools with its standard fallen a new low,when Nehru had built IITs, he  was completely ignorant of the necessity of improving primary education, so our public schools are at the mercy of a corrupt system.

       We ceIebrate mediocre in every field including art and literature in our over enthusiasm for English and really gifted language writers are sidelined or not appreciated enough. My English professor Vishnu Narayanan Namboothiri in Brennen College,Talassery(Kerala) is a renowned Malayalam poet, on being asked why he writes in Malayalam, he said that he can express his heart’s deeper feelings only in his mother tongue. Perhaps  great creation or innovations are possible only in one’s mother tongue. There is a view going around  as to why \developing countries are so and developed countries are so, because all the developed countries educate in their mother tongue, but developing countries in Asia ,Africa,South-central America educate in a foreign language. This argument may or may not be right, yet there is some ‘method’ in this argument. I’m not against English, but we must understand that English is just another language having a wider reach, yet that doesn’t make it superior to other languages and it is through our mother tongue that we communicate to our heart, and it is the door to one’s culture.