Language,Rituals ,Politics

http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/teaching-in-tongues/99/

My response 

To kill a language in India you do not need necessarily make it a third language, even as a second language you can do it . I can say it with authority as a person who used to teach both French and German for plus two +2, to some college students, some scientists, some diplomats etc. None of the students can speak nor were expected to neither speak nor even understand when spoken to in these languages. The story of Sanskrit also is the same I got 190 out of 200 in P.U.C. it was the University second mark and I did it writing 80 percent of the paper in English.

The malady is because we want to and we follow most things ritualistically or just for the sake of doing it. Some 40 years back it was arts and crafts period where we were all given a bunch of cotton and spindle whorl [called Thakli in Tamil]{see  picture in this link http://pages.ucsd.edu/~dkjordan/arch/cloth.html}  to bring out  threads out of raw cotton and sometimes the spinning wheel { http://theknittinggenie.com/2014/03/05/youre-doing-it-even-more-wrong-or-how-the-great-wheel-survived/} [both these were given as part of the arts and crafts perhaps because Mahatma Gandhi used them, fortunately/unfortunately they did not give cigarettes because Nehru used them or tissue paper because lady Mountbatten used it.]

Instead had they given paint, brush and canvass India could have produced lot of Picassos.

What is the point in learning a language which you are never going to use for communication or understand when someone communicates in that language, or for that matter doing anything which is not going to be of use to you or through you to the society or your own body, mind or soul; what is the point in doing something which neither influences or impacts you nor do you influence or impact it. Incidentally on both these two topics I recently wrote two pieces

1] One on rituals
http://contentwriteups.blogspot.in/2014/06/indo-china-relations-and-ritualistic.html

 

2] Politics of language
http://contentwriteups.blogspot.in/2014/06/language-its-limitless-limitation.html