01. Self-loathing or assertion of dignity?

Teaching English is not similar to the endeavours of Nehru, Subash, and Gandhi etc. They all reaped ‘respect’ by becoming leaders. However, teaching pristine English has the opposite effect. ‘Respect’ gets erased when lower classes learn English. Then what is the real benefit in allowing the lower classes to learn English?

Well, the issue is that the question that is asked is from the perspective of the feudal language mood. In feudal languages, the personal benefit has to be specifically understood. Even if one is living in a stink-like area, it does not really matter, if one gets ‘respect’. It is enjoyable. Even if one sits in a claustrophobic government office room for the entirety of a lifetime, it is still enjoyable if it garners him or her ‘respect’. However, when viewing the same scenario from English, the whole context changes. The fact that one is in a stink-like area becomes very obvious. There is no ‘respect’ to enjoy. What one wants is clean environment, freedom of articulation and movement, and space. What one feels is the liberal ambience in the air. It is a feeling that changes the very mental and physical demeanour.

Well, this has been my issue. I do not want to sit in a closed office or cabin and enjoy stifling ‘respect’. I want a clean township, where one can walk around with no concern of whether another man does get up in a pose of respect or not, and talk to another person without the insistent brooding as to whether he or she is using respectful words in each and every sentence.

Beyond this, the understanding that a stifled and contorted looks of a lower class Indian can be changed into a beautiful demeanour by a simple change of language of thought and interaction goes on protruding me to inform this information to the other man.

Now, there is this experience of mine with regard to imparting English to many of the lower classes. They improve and understand the full potential and possibilities in learning English in the form that I am teaching. That is, quite different from the feudal-content loaded Indian-English. However they are disconcerted with the possibility that I would continue to disseminate this to others of the lower classes with whom they are competing with. They do not have competition with the upper classes. Their competition is with the class of people who are at their own level.

There is this experience of mine when I used to go driving my jeep on business trips on long distances. I used to give lifts to persons who have missed the last bus in the night hours. At times, some persons of slightly good social stature would get inside. He would then try to set up a conversation with me for the brief period he is in the jeep. However, when I stop to pick up some other person on the road, who naturally wouldn’t be of an equal social stature as him, he would quite openly express his antipathy and dissatisfaction for what I am doing.

Some of such persons have even mentioned not to allow ‘low class’ persons in the jeep. Now, this is also one of the issues of improving some persons with English. They do not want this help to be given to others who are in similar plights as theirs. Some of them would even go to the extent of creating antipathy for me in the others as a ruse to make them keep away from me.

I am sure that my complete writings would seem to be off-track to a person who has studied formal history. See this comment that came sneering at me in reply to my comment on HuffingtonPost.

kay360 April 11, 2012 at 8:07am

By the way, the fact that you think Blacks should be “grateful” for the sheer brutality they suffered under the British in the US, Caribbean, and Africa and that you think the cultures of the Indian subcontinent are “low-quality social systems” just reveals you to be extremely ignorant. Don’t argue with a person with a degree in history. Makes you look like a complete fool.

MY COMMENT: What can one say to a person who has a ‘degree in history’ and yet, has not had any idea about what the feudal content in Indian languages is? The issue here is something like this. See this conversation in Malayalam:

Now what is the problem here? See this English translation of the conversation:

Why didn’t you come yesterday?

I did come yesterday. You were sleeping then.

Why didn’t your mother come for work today? You should tell her to see my wife.

My mother will come and see her tomorrow.

TO HIS FRIEND: These persons never come on time.

Well, is there anything degrading, despoiling, discriminatory or snubbing in this conversation? It would be quite unusual if any native-English speaker were to see anything negative in this conversation. However, the fact is that there is a terrible degradation, and social snubbing in this conversation which cannot be translated into English. See the words You, Her and These people. The red ones denote converting into stinking dirt and the blue ones denote ennobling.

Without having even a minor hint of this great atrophying of human dignity, a person is claiming intelligence of human social systems.

Self-loathing or assertion of dignity?

See this wonderful comment that came arguing with me:

honeybear July 14, 2012 at 4:58pm

QUOTE: Sorry about the link situation. I noticed at your website that you are located in India. Are you a British subject, left over from the “Raj,” or are you “native” to India? The reason I ask is that I want to try to get a grasp on your thinking. If you are of the “old school.” I think I can safely assume what your mindset is...but I would not understand it coming from an East Indian. That would appear to me to come from a place of self-loathing through indoctrination.

From you politics and your view of British superiority...it is difficult for me to understand such thinking coming from a group of people who were once oppressed by the British, in thinking that they should be grateful for that oppression. I do understand the in-fighting of internal politics. But, without another clue as to your background...there is no rhyme or reason to it.

I know that Britain did not come to control India through conquest...but it was through the British East India Company...that India lost control of its country...however, the hands of Britain are bathed in gore up to its elbows with East Indian blood. How do you equate that with greatness. You act as though India would not have grown on its own accord without British domination.

I just do not get your logic (or lack of it). END OF QUOTE

Actually this comment contains links to so many different issues. However, since I am focusing on one particular issue, let me take that up. Am I being subservient and self-loathing in my ideas? And who was the oppressors of ‘Indians’? That second question has been answered in the book elsewhere. Now to the question of my seeming to be having an inferiority complex.

Well, the truth is that I do not have any inferiority complex and I do not train such things in my trainees. The fact is that I go everywhere with a very high level superiority complex. This very commenter has mentioned these lines earlier with regard to a writing of mine:

honeybear July 14, 2012 at 12:02am

Went there...took a peek...nothing new...another exercise in pomposity. END OF COMMENT

Even though I am not pompous, the commenter’s impression is vividly not of any inferiority complex in my writings. However, the issue here is that I seem to be placing myself below the English citizens. Well, this should be degrading. What is the real fact?

The real fact is that I am not placing anyone under the English. As to myself, I do not want to place myself under an ‘Indian’. Nor do I want to place myself above an ‘Indian’. If I am under an Indian, he or she would surely use the pejorative part of the Indian vernaculars to define me as well as to address me. If I am above the ‘Indians’, like for example an Indian government official, the local people would have to address me as well as define me as divinity. This would bring in satanic attributes in me, by bringing in a feeling of self-importance in me. I would quite easily get the feeling that I am omnipotent. I do not want to act as a demigod.

As to being ruled by the English, well, the fact is that I do not want to be ruled by the ‘Indians’. That is for sure. I speak this much in very candid and unmistakable terms. I have experienced ‘Indian rule’. That is a terrible kind of rule. I have gone to Indian government offices umpteen times to get official papers. They would make me go back again and again. Just to make me go subservient. I do not want to be subservient to the ‘Indian’ government officials.

Last year, I think just to get an Income Certificate, I had to go a number of times to the Village Office. One time, the clerk simply told me thus: We do not know what kind of income you are getting from your online writing work. You have to get a Rs. 10 Stamp Paper and have your statement about that work endorsed.

Well, there is a route to get these official papers very fast. That is to go through the route of official connections. For one of my parents was a senior government officer. Yet, I refrain from going that way. For, I want to experience the way the ‘Indian’ officials treat the native people of this place.

I remember a time many years ago, when I wanted a possession certificate. The officials in the Village Office would tell me, ‘Come day-after-tomorrow’. I was a businessman then. I would have to move quite far distances and reach back home after some five days. However, since I was required to be present in the village office on the subsequent day, I would go on my two-wheeler for some three hundred kilometres and return that day itself in the night.

However, when I reach the Village Office, the clerk would simply say, ‘The head clerk was absent yesterday.’ Come after one day. Again, I would travel to some 300 kilometres in another direction and come rushing back in the night. The next day, some other issue would be mentioned. I remember that it took me around six months to get this certificate. In my case, it was just a study that I was doing. In the case of the majority native persons here, it is literally playing with fire to be assertive with the ‘Indian’ official class. They have to bribe and be subservient.

I remember the old times of the officer class of the Madras Presidency. An absence of any clerk or superintendant was not an excuse for denying the giving of any paper to the member of the public. The officer concerned had to personally do it, if the clerk or superintendent was absent. That was the training given to them by the erstwhile English officers. Now, the training and mood is quite different. The present day mood is that the common man is an idiot and a dog; and he has to be kept in his position. Treat him like the dog that he is!