24. The antipathy for teaching English

Language codes have a great say in the design structure of a social system.

Planar languages like English will create a planar-feeling in social and other human relationships. This will be seen very clearly reflected in the social areas where pristine-English is spoken.

However, this will create a great deal of perplexity in persons who cannot speak this language. For it would be seen that persons who are very evidently of comparatively less physical strength, voice power, social stature and influence, financial acumen and even age, are conversing among themselves without any hint of any kind of communication block. This would only create a mood of antipathy towards them among the others. This is a common experience.

However, the people who speak English in this location (nation) are not native-Englishmen. Instead, they are persons who are quite conversant in their native languages. Many persons use English most of the time, simply to overcome the communication blocks and the feudal higher man – lower man hierarchy in their native languages. And to get their things done fast and smoothly.

This is not an individual capacity of inherent in them. Instead, this is a capacity that arrives in them when they use the smooth communication software known as English. This is a capacity that can be achieved by anyone.

However, many persons who are good in English in this nation (India) desperately try to see that others do not learn English.

There are many reasons for this.

The main urge for this comes from the feudalism inside the native languages of the nation.

If persons who are subordinate socially, age-wise, financial acumen or by professional grade, learn English, the strings that have bound them up for ages would get broken or erased. This would be viewed as a total breakdown of discipline by those who are above them.

If English is learned, the persons who are above will move downwards. Those who are below will move up. But then, no one will be disparaged or insulted. For, in English there are no verbal codes for higher – lower individual.

In this nation, the group of persons who argue most vehemently that English should not be taught to the common man, are the very persons who are good in English. I have personally had a number of discussions with such persons online, in English itself, on this topic.

These persons without any qualms, demand in reasonably good English itself, that it is Hindi that has to be taught, it is Malayalam that has to be taught, it is Sanskrit that has to be taught &c. However, when the fact that they themselves are good in English is mentioned, they would take up the stance that English is a very silly language.

(It might seem quite strange that no native of Malabar was seen to demand that Malabari, which is a language that has very little influence of both Sanskrit as well as Tamil, should be taught!)