English

For us, Indians, English – this one word brings may thoughts to our mind. For few it may be a change, when they get bored of DESI, for those who are entering into adulthood, this may be thrilling and exciting to watch, but for many, like me, it’s always a dreaded thing – from school to even this stage in life.

From getting the minimum 35 out of 100 and then who doesn’t even know whether to put the hands on the chair or the table while facing the interview, understand the question and then translate it from mother tongue to back in English, simultaneously thinking, whether to use “would” or “will”, the grammar – a person who goes through this only can understand this.

Bollywood also mentioned this difficulty with this language. Big B’s famous, “I can talk English, I can walk English, I can laugh English, because English is very funny language” tells us the same. It may be a funny language, but most of the times, it makes fun of us in-front of others.

Then again the confusing words, with just a vowel here and there – ‘erratic’ – ‘erotic’, ‘rite’- ‘riot’, not to forget one more ‘right’. Washroom, Toilet, Urinals, Lavatory all these names for doing the same business. To add to this, there is Mr. Tharoor, who brings up such words, it’s difficult to believe those words belong to English language. I think, many of his followers on various social platforms, follow him more for his prowess in English than his political ideology.

Though we say, it doesn’t matter the proficiency in English, but the way you talk and pronounce, shows where you stand, at least the first impression. In job description, ‘effective communication’ always means good English speaking rather than communicating something with logic and meaningful thoughts.

No doubt, English is the language of present and will be important in future as well, but the issue is, we unnecessarily give too much importance to the correctness of this language. A South Indian or North Indian guy talking the respective languages of each other, they both get it wrong, that time we correct them without judging, but same is never the case when someone gets wrong in English. This changes the scenario totally. This creates an inferiority complex and it will remain with that person for the whole life. It’s true for me and there will be many like me as well.

This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try and get better in this, like in many other things we do. Don’t know how many mistakes I made here too, but just wanted to put it here, which was there in my heart for so many years.

Vb