About Languages

For quite a while now, I am vexed by languages. Started with discussions about "All Indians speak English, right?" And then the electronic scripting and printing in Bengali and other Indian languages. How come I have never seen one single bengali keyboard in my life, but only the glorious literature? So, did some investigations.

I very much hate the idea of being educated means knowing English - what had become in India now. native tongue is so much better for beginners. Higher education, I agree is better in english because of our multi-ethnic population, as well as so much of science and technology being in english. Anyway, but need to do away with this stupid notion of english=>educated. I found only about 5-10% of Indians know English. Rest don't, or can barely speak a little. I had assumed atleast 20%, and hence was very pleasantly surprised. Next, more than 40% people know Hindi, and a majority can understand or speak. So, this is very good news. But, hope those hindi-ites don't go about imposing Hindi as the mode of government as they tried to do with the Official languages bill in 1963-65. Pride in diversity.

And about Bengali - it is the 5th most spoken language in the world. And, still i cannot read anandabazar.com on mozilla. I have to open using IE, which I had to reinstall. (I had removed it from my windows laptop). This is such pathetic state of being. All because of this stupid fascination with english. Found some people from Bangladesh working on a project to put bengali script on mozilla. Will surely try to contribute my bit. So the saying is true - Bangladeshis are keeping the language alive. So, my next project is to learn about rendering of fonts.