We started off by discussing the Indian music and the award won by it including the latest by A. R. Rahman. Then we went on to the fact that India is one of the oldest civilizations in world and that we had a planned city in Indus Valley civilization in existence much before others. India has made contributions to medical science (charak samhita), to mathematics (zero) and to trade in the ancient times. Also how we had Vedas and other ancient text which are a repository of lot of knowledge. Also culturally we were also good, in architecture as show by Khajuraho, Ajanta, Ellora etc. The Gupta dynasty has also sent naval armies to fight the sea pirates active in the current Indonesian region. Then came the point where we talked about how we fell from grace and came to be what we are now. Then we came onto why every country is promoting its own language and culture and why are we running after English. We discussed the benefits of promoting English versus promoting Hindi and the difficulties posed by both.
The benefits of English are:
1) Ability to do business with the world which has enabled our growth up to this point
2) Easy access to all the technological and other developments across world most of which is in English or is available readily translated in English.
The benefits of Hindi are:
1) Encouraging our own culture
2) Inclusion of rural populace in the mainstream of development
The difficulties in promoting English are that a huge percentage of our population has no access to ways to learn English and join the mainstream where good paying job and avenues of development are available. The difficulty in promoting Hindi is that a huge amount of investment will be required by way of translation of lots of stuff into Hindi as well as the fact that India doesn’t have a common language. We will need to undertake this activity in all the major languages of India. And corporate won’t take this up as it doesn’t make much business sense of them and the kind of inefficiency and lethargy Indian government has shown in its working it can’t be expected to take this up and complete this successfully.
One good point for vernacular languages is that once the benefits of development reach the masses of India, Indian companies will have to cater to them in vernaculars which will lead to their development. But somewhere this is a circular path and we don’t see the circle starting anytime soon. Maybe what the government can do is enable both the options and let people be their own judge. English can be a driver of growth but only for so much time as
export led growth cannot really work unless there is domestic demand. The sustained development for an economy can come only from internal demand. Exports can help for some time but in the end they should be a means to achieve development for all. An example was cited of the telecom companies having call centers catering
to the vernacular speaking population. Also if the services are to be made available to rural populace, it will have to in a language that they are comfortable in rather than one that is imposed on them.
Hence finally it should be left to people to decide for themselves. The government should work to make both the options viable but let people choose for themselves but they must have that choice and equal opportunities in both.
