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The great language debate

 Ever since they launched the New Education Policy, the current day scenario was ripening for its own sweet time, with every ambivalent opportunist politician, worth their salt, having a go at the poor masses, confusing them with their crazy concoctions of deceit and lies. With the three-language policy, the current government has opened a literal can of worms across the country with each political nut, turning the other into a zombie, with their crack pot ideologies, across the spectrum. Why should one read more languages? what is the use? why not? what is the harm? you are lying to bring in hindi. you are lying because you already have hindi in your institutions. These seems to be the standard quotes that you get..no..are forced to hear whenever, by mistake, you stumble across any news channel.

The harsh reality is way different. If i take junior as example, the way they teach tamil in his school makes me cry in anguish. Despite my best of efforts to influence him into reading tamil in the form of comics and story books, he struggles to even read a single string of sentence, leave alone making meaning out of it. It is as if a mirror image of my own case when i went through a similar phase with English, well into my secondary school years! But with English being omnipresent, eventually you'll get a chance to pick it up. But regional languages have an impediment in this space where beyond the institutions, one hardly gets a chance to study them. The rate at which things are moving, by next generation, we will definitely end up with two language system for there wouldn't be any other language left to learn!! Most of the regional languages will eventually melt into spoken dialects and may soon loose out on their rich cultural heritage. The most absurd yet sad video that i happened to saw which was slightly funny as well was that the goons who went around tarring any sign board in hindi, where actually painting english black, not knowing the difference between the two languages!! That one video would be sufficient to rest my case! Long back i read a short story (by Sujatha i guess) where in a rebel group in distant future will be communicating in a cryptic code that the incumbent government agencies find brain wrackingly difficult to crack. They some how figure out in the end that the rebel group were actually communicating in Tamil, a language long lost to time! That story sounds more prophetical than fictional, considering the current system of education and the chaos around it!!

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Comments

Ramesh said…
"every ambivalent opportunist politician, worth their salt, having a go at the poor masses, confusing them with their crazy concoctions of deceit and lies" - Completely agree. Not one of them is interested in the actual welfare of the child.

Why should the state have any say at all in what language you should learn or not learn. That's an individual choice. Governments should stay out of it. Period.

Ha Ha on the goons tarring English signs thinking that is Hindi. And a comment on Sujatha's story of the uncrackable code language. For any non Tamilian learning Tamilian, that is exactly true even now ! Well, even for a Tamilian like me, its partly true !!!
Saturday, March 08, 2025
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