Article is well written but I don’t think Mr. Salman Rushdie has been conferred with a Nobel Prize. Please correct me if I am wrong. - Anjum Parwej - June 17, 2007

"It is impossible to survive without English"

I guess our British masters taught us that and we remain slaves to their language and culture. But there are others who think differently.

In fact a billion and a half people not only "survive" but flourish without English forcing the rest of the world to learn their language. These people are the Chinese who with their patriotism and dedication will soon be dominating the world.

A re-cap of how they achieved this is useful.

In 1949 China achieved independence (or "liberation" as the Chinese refer to ) from foreign occupation interference and civil war. The circumstances then were far more traumatic than that which India underwent. However the problem of illiteracy and a lop sided educational system was identical to that which was faced by India at the time. China had a small educated elite well versed in English or French and located mostly in the port cities and the capital, (mirroring India's own elite located in Calcutta, Madras, Bombay and Delhi). The rest of the population (comprising about 95% of the population) living in the rural heartland and inner cities was either illiterate or with minimal education.

There was not much hope that the western educated Chinese elite would live up to their responsibilities and help educate the rest of the population in English or a western language. The western educated elite were too busy trying to migrate out of China to greener pastures. Like India, China faced a shortage of English teachers, however India had an advantage in the fact that the first generation of English knowing students could be educated in the Christian mission or public schools. In the case of China the political differences with the West ensured that the few English language Christian mission schools were shut-down. The task of educating the masses thus fell to the humble rural school teachers and those with university education but with very poor foreign language skills. The difficulty of promoting literacy was compounded by the fact that the Chinese language was still stuck in 15th century terminology and unsuitable for teaching advanced science or technology. How quickly a language can become obsolete is starkly exposed by the example that if a time machine were to take us but thirty years back and some one said that he could not "download" his "e-mail from his desk-top to his palm-top" it would mean nonsense to all the people around. The Chinese language was not only obsolete but it was also very cumbersome and extremely difficult to write on account of the fact that the words were actually symbols and not phonetically formed.

The Chinese took the bold step of reforming their language. The language was simplified and updated with modern technical equivalents. The Chinese also introduced 'pinyin' a system which allowed the Chinese words to be written in a phonetic form using characters similar to Roman alphabet. (The Hindi film industry follows this unwittingly when they write in Roman script "Qayamat sey Qayamat tak.." because the blunt fact is that more people can understand Hindi than read it).

The Chinese then took a massive educational reform program in three tiers:

1. Adult literacy was compulsory. Every adult had to learn the basic writing and reading skills.

2. Children's education was free and compulsory. Regardless of rank ALL children would go to the SAME school in the neighborhood. So the rich and poor both went to the same schools learning only Chinese ( the simplified and modernised version).

3. The universities and colleges would teach only in Chinese with extremely advanced compulsory classes in a foreign language of choice (English, French, Russian).

4. A highly advanced translation service was set up to translate every foreign book, document, and technical paper into Chinese. Thus no section of the society felt disadvantaged due to language skills.

This educational policy had a massive social advancement effect. A whole generation of extremely well educated Chinese technocrats, scientists and scholars came up with an extremely alert and literate population. Because the scientific and technical manpower was more familiar working in Chinese, the brain drain out of China was insignificant. In fact in the fifties there was a reverse drain when scientists and engineers of Chinese origin living in North America and Europe were impressed with China's educational progress, and fired with patriotism returned to China to further help the educational process. With its large pool of professionals China set up a massive manufacturing infrastructure setting it on its path to a super-power status.

Today however the Chinese are taking a second look at their educational policy. Their initial goals have been achieved. They have achieved minimum basic education with a very high standard of science for their entire population regardless of gender, race, religion or social status. They have achieved a very high standard of professional technical education at their universities and research institutes. In addition their own culture and language remains un-adultrated and is flourishing. Having achieved that the the Chinese now want to be viewed as world friendly. Tourists should be able to visit China and move freely and investment in the service sector will give an additional boost to the economy and image of China in the world if only China's banking, airlines, shipping, insurance, soft-ware firms and medical centers had more English or foreign language speaking people. China's service sector is facing an acute shortage of English speaking persons, and even though the reverse migration of people of Chinese origin from all over Asia, North America, Australia and Europe has helped there is still a very wide gap between supply and demand.

Which is why China has started a massive English education policy. It is remarkable how even in the remotest villages and inner cities China is implementing its English literacy program with the same fervor and dedication as when it launched the drive to reform education over five decades ago. Adults are signing up for English classes and computer aided language labs have cropped up like mushrooms. Children are now being taught English from the fourth standard. Since the entire population is literate to begin with teaching them another language given the will and determination is relatively easy. In India most of those who cannot read or write English usually are poorly educated in any other language also. (The Hindi movie industry is a stark reminder of this fact when the posters and banners invariably carry the message in English).

The old Chinese language was stripped of its religious, and class based idioms and simplified to the language spoken on the ground. Thus the reformed language became a medium for social development and now in the rest of the world when we say Chinese we mean mainland Mandarin instead of Traditional Taiwanese-Cantonese which is a relic of the past and confined to Taiwan as an obsolete dinosaur.

The United Nations has adopted Chinese (mainland Mandarin) as one of its official languages (along with French, English and Russian) and over 100 universities worldwide teach Mandarin.

India did the reverse with its own language. Instead of keeping the old simplified Hindustani that worked so well for the film industry and used successfully by every administration prior to India's independence and upgrading it to match the scientific terminology of the times Hindi was transformed more an more into a religious language. The Hindi of today is a pumped up artificial lingo that not even the erstwhile poet Prime Minister of India (himself an exponent of this language ) uses in his own poems. This artificial lingo is thrust upon the unfortunate lower middle class student in the Hindi medium schools with the result that it promotes little love and respect for the language. The lower middle class person prefers to speak in his local dialect because he is more comfortable with that language. The upper classes of India today speak a mixture of English and Hindi for the very valid reason that the Hindi has failed to live up to its promise.

We have today a class of smart alec convent or public-school educated youth, who can jabber short slang English sentences into a telephone microphone or punch letters into a computer key board but cannot speak a single continuous sentence in either English or Hindi or write a letter in long hand. They cannot also read a novel or a piece of literature. This is the workforce of our Business Provider Outsourcing establishment where the workers are not only out of tune with India in so far as their biological clocks are concerned but are also out of tune culturally, and psychologically with India, forever drooling at the goodies overseas and trying to be more like their clients rather than their fellow countrymen. Worse this bunch of "English" speaking clerks often drop out of college in the quest for more hours or more wages forever chasing their spending habits prompted by their credit card companies.

China on the other hand does not produce college drop-out smart-alec tongue twister champions affecting an American accent to convince their clients overseas that he or she is connected not to Gurgaon, Haryana but to Racine Wisconsin. They produce a million engineers a year who can read hydraulics schematic drawings or design a computer chip that they can fit into their satellites.

We have a long way to go to achieve the kind of self reliance or unity like China which has certain inherent advantages of language and cultural unity. In the absence of a national language English is the best option for the nation, though national unity on this basis will still remain a dream. However as the Chinese have shown English is not the answer to all the problems of a nation. - Reza Sami , SC, USA - June. 17, 2007

I sincerely apologize for the factual mistake regarding Nobel Prize, which was confered to V. S. Naipaul and not Salman Rushdie, I intended to refer to the prestigious 'Sir' title recently given to Mr. Rushdie. I heartily thank Mr. Parwez for sighting this error and remain indebted. - Nabeel A. Khan, New Delhi - June. 18, 2007

Discussion on this topic is now closed.