Question

write a essay on

Learning English: A Blessing or Curse for Indians​

Answer 1

Answer:

Learning English: A Blessing or Curse for Indians

More than half a century has passed since British rule ended in India but the language of those rulers has a much firmer hold on Indian society today than at the time they departed. This may not be a cause for concern. After all, English is the language in which most advances in the fields of science, technology, business, entertainment, etc. are expressed. It is the language of the most powerful and most developed nation on the earth. The greater the acceptance of English language in Indian society – the argument goes – the faster India would advance.

If this were true, India would already be more developed than East Asian nations where medium of instructions is non-English. In fact, quite the reverse is true, and how! It is not our fluent-in-English engineers who go and make cars and televisions in Korea. Rather, it is Korean engineers who by studying translated-from-English-to-Korean books somehow better absorb the knowledge and are able to make better use of it. One can give such examples in virtually any field of endeavor.

Could it be that mastery of the English language is not essential for progress? Japan has been demonstrating this for more than a century. Some may view this as an exception due to legendary industriousness of those people. But Taiwan and Korean have followed the same non-English path, with similar results and now China is growing by leaps and bounds to eclipse all other Asian nations, without mandating its citizens to learn English.

Of course, India is different! Not so in the sense that our languages are too primitive to be fit for translation from English; far from it since all Indian languages are either directly-derived-from or greatly-influenced-by Sanskrit, which had one of the richest word-stocks in the ancient world. India is different in that it has many languages and there is pervasive apathy and even animosity between these languages. In this discordant atmosphere, a language of foreign lands rules even though an average citizen can barely comprehend a sentence or two in it.