English Speaking Curse

English is a source of anxiety, even despair, for its have-nots

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The Journey Of Indian Women In Electoral Politics

India’s women-centric policies were conceived mostly under global influence, until the rising women voter turnout in the country changed the trend.

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Bihar's Electoral Secret: How Nitish Kumar Created Women's Vote Bank With Women-Centric Policies

When the Narendra Modi government introduced the Women’s Reservation Bill, it was seen as an attempt to polarise women voters towards the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), but, when it comes to polarising women voters, Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar is way ahead.

Umesh Kumar Ray
The Case For Affirmative Action And Reservation In India

The support for the Women’s Reservation bill reaffirms India’s faith in affirmative action even as it highlights its dichotomous allegiance to ‘meritocracy’ at the cost of inequity.

Rakhi Bose
Introduction
Red Lipstick And Bindi: Symbols Of Feminist Defiance

The Women’s Reservation Bill has been passed after 27 years. The struggle for a seat at the table has been long. We go to the table being us. As women who want to redefine, reconfigure and reset the narratives. We begin with lipstick and bindi.

Chinki Sinha
Last Page
Diary Of Nostalgia

Nostalgia is like wearing rose-tinted glasses but on some nights, it is good to return to the good old days when a condom could transform into a piglet and an antenna was the medium through which we saw the world outside of our little worlds

Ashutosh Salil

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Updated: 05 Feb 2022 8:52 pm

The buzz around "fixing" India's English is growing louder and louder....

The British Council plans to train 7,50,000 Indian teachers in English over the next five years
Narendra Modi is paying for 5 lakh young Gujaratis to learn English in time for Gujarat's golden jubilee in 2010
A new English-teaching TV programme, Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain, is being launched on NDTV to cash in on the huge aspiration for English
A Hyderabad-based company has announced plans to deliver a daily dose of English words and their meanings to mobile phones, so that Indians can improve their English vocabulary
The Delhi government is teaching cabbies to speak English in time for the Commonwealth Games in 2010

Brajesh Kumar's personal file is pristine - no thumbmarks, no blotches, no yellowing pages. There wasn't time. Within weeks of his joining a private engineering college in upscale Greater Noida, the 22-year-old had committed suicide, leaving a note saying that he could not cope with courses taught in English. An engineering diploma-holder from Jaunpur in UP, Brajesh cleared an all-UP competitive exam to get into the second year of a degree course at the Noida college. In his slim personal file, there were pictures of an intense-looking young man, forms filled in a neat, careful English handwriting, copies of school and college certificates that showed that while Brajesh had studied English as a subject until Class 10, the rest of his education, including his diploma, was in Hindi. He had also taken the competitive exam in Hindi. As a second-year student, he had no access to the Noida college's English skills programme, provided only to first-year students, and could not afford private coaching.