Colonial Mind-set syndrome

Few days ago, when I wrote my blog on emoticons in Marathi, I got one strange reply. One person said, “Hey, dude, why don’t you write in English frequently, there will be more people to read, plus it will help you to get more viewers on your blog and you know what, you can also get paid by Google Adsense.” I replied, “I wrote Just to bring the knowledge in my mother tongue, Marathi”. I got hand folded (namaskar) smiley and laughing emoticon as reply.

The bigger issues is here is, in a country like India, which has strong dominance of colonial mind-set, still considers, English as a status symbol cum language to get monitory benefits.  These are the same people who prefer speaking in English at their home, with their kids and worry about heritage. The same people,  got benefitted by economic reforms and still complains about how corrupt we are. (Sounds familiar, AAP?)

English has always been language of elites in India. You can spot many examples where you can observe English makes class difference.  For an example many journalist working in regional language media are less paid than their colleagues in English press. There are many things behind the curtains but the real culprit is colonial mindset, isn’t it?

One fine reason is losing bilingual scholars, which India had like Ambedkar, Nehru, Savarkar.  These scholars created marvelous works in more than one language. These people created good image of being bilingual scholar. We don’t see much of such scholars now.

Our education system, in which we are trained to get marks and seldom taught aesthetics of the subjects apart from exam, is the root cause. However, purpose of this blogpost is to fight with colonial mindset and not to target an individual or a group. If they think I have hurt their sentiments, they must think over it.

Post Script- When Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Chinese counterpart, held press conference together; Indian PM spoke in English while Chinese president preferred, Chinese.