Posted on 06/20/2014 11:08:01 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Since Lord Macaulay set out to turn Indias native elite into a class of persons Indian in blood and color, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect in 1835, English has been the countrys language of government.
But according to a leaked memo, Indian officials must now use Hindi in all official posts on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Ministers have also ordered officials, many of whom do not speak fluent Hindi, to use the language in presentations.
The disclosure provoked an angry response from state leaders across the country yesterday, who resent the imposition of Hindi.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
If the sword of Islam continues to rise, they’ll be speaking Arabic in no time.
Obama + ISIS = peas in a pod
As a layman on such things, I thought that their adopting English so thoroughly was one of the great, little discussed genius decisions by any nation, in a very long time.
It seemed so brilliant and committed, and effective, that it was almost threatening.
Although this Hindu nationalist won a clear majority, he won’t retain it if he forces 60% of the population whose native language is not Hindi to use it to work. Really stupid to reject a language which enables them to engage in commerce throughout the world.
The guy owns a piece of Rosetta Stone..
The new PM is sabotaging his party’s future. The hundreds of millions who speak Bengali, Telugu, etc. as their first language will not want to be treated like second class citizens.
Maybe it will be like the Metric Scare. At various times beginning in the late 60’s, many were saying “Americans MUST being using the metric system. All other developed nations already use it, so why not us too? It’s such a simple method!” There was some adaptation with liquid products, such as gasoline, being sold in Metric units, but most people still use basic units. It just never did catch on in private transaction or communication. I suspect India will come to much the same conclusion after spending x amount of millions in this experiment.
That should kill any future outsourcing of phone and
technical support contracts from the English speaking
world. There is trouble enough with the cultural and
timezone issues.
Just please don’t extend that requirement to our help desk, it’s hard enough to understand them as it is ,,,
Also, this is only for the Central Gov't - not the private sector or the states.
India has but one advantage as far as I’m concerned: many, if not most, of its citizens speak English. If it weren’t for that, their programmers wouldn’t be in such demand. It’s not because they’re so good - they’re not. The Russians blow them away imo, but the only English most of them know is a programming language. At least that’s what I came away with after seven years talent-spotting in Europe and Australasia.
I'm sure Yevgeniy Valentinovich agrees with you.
Narendra is blowing it if he thinks blowing off the language of Macaulay is a good move. But then, all politics is local. Maybe he knows what he's doing.
India is very much a polyglot state - this isn’t going to sit too well with speakers of Tamil, Telegu, Malayalam, Bengali etc.
What? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
All of the region that made up India was a polyglot of many mutually unintelligible languages, of which was only one, Hindi, was spoken at most by only some regions.
Adoption of English as the official language solved a lot of problems, but it also papered over a lot of basic tribal and regional differences, principally between the Muslims and everybody else in India. Pakistan and Bangladesh were divided off from the main part of India just over this religious difference. All the Muslims were supposed to go to what was then “East” and “West” Pakistan, but it didn’t quite happen that way.
Sounds like Quebec.
Haha. Well, what can I say. Try to convince the young that they are no longer to speak English. Dumb sh*ts...
1 step foreward....10 back.
Modi’s picking a fight he doesn’t need to.
Yes, which indicates he wants to.
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