Justifying the case for selfishness

Please do not read further if you can't recognise or appreciate sarcasm.

A recent article on BBC said that the growth in number of English speakers in India is too slow! Some nationalists and great souls who can survive without a functional brain would rejoice on reading this. They are not without good reason to do so. English proficiency is inevitable for development of the nation as a whole, but surely not if you are hell-bent on keeping the socio-economic hierarchy dictated by the caste system undisturbed. It is only as long as the current elites keep the English knowledge and education to themselves (and make sure that the poor stay the way they are) that these elites can enjoy the fruits of capitalism. We can ask the child born for illiterate parents to study three languages. Obviously the child fails to pass the exams because his /her parents can not teach the child themselves nor can they afford to hire private tutors. We are free to pretend that we do not know that North Indian and South Indian languages are very different (by script, grammar, vocabulary and origin) and stay adamant in refusing that it is cruel to expect the three language formula has a norm in a nation with such low literacy rate. But, these are no big issues since we should care less about lesser beings nor it is a great loss for mankind, isn’t it? After all, every poor child that drops out of school would mean one more slave for our children, one more slum dweller whom we can look down with disgust and one more antisocial who we loath for being so insensitive about "our" sentiments and wellbeing.

As Professor Hardgrave of University of Texas explains the North [India] was and is keen to stuff Hindi on the South, but least bothered to learn anything about the South. Why should the North anyways be bothered about the sambar eating, ennada rascala talking, sweaty faced, dark skinned, annoyed and irritated (and irritating) southerners? Funny enough the three language policy itself is in place because we all know that English is vital to our survival. But why do we have more languages added to English? We do that, supposedly, because we need an Indian language to be the link language for all Indians to communicate with each other and not a foreign tongue. Hindi descends from Sanskrit which which has been unequivocally proven to be born in Afghan-Iran border regions which got a bit mutated in India (as Khariboli) and absorbing Persian and Arabic into it. It is indeed a very truly and natively Indian language, which some might foolishly claim to fall short of any qualifications of the Dravidian languages, which which are born and bred in the subcontinent. Well, but the Dravidian languages don't have good numbers of speakers isn't it? Next step is to dethrone the tiger as the national animal and give that seat to rats – the same with peacock too for crows. Numbers matter – it always does!

On NDTV's Big fight debate on the “language debacle in India” the sole surviving Gandhian, Mr N. D Tiwari, aptly pointed out that Hindi was the language used in the freedom struggle and that of Gandhi. Why would or should he or any of his battalion go through the annals of history that it was imposition of Hindi over Urdu that played a major role to the nation being partitioned or the fact that Gandhi wanted every child to learn at least 5 languages at school before she/he would learn science or maths, and every kid should learn to draw before they do to write. I'm sure all of these supporters of cause of Hindi as link language have bothered to read the Mahatma's biography – after all they are using his name as a reason.

We should care less if India's progress is dragged down at the cost of imposing Hindi on rest of the population. Let us be proud to be foolishly selfish!