Chasing success and status, Indians learning English
BHOPAL, India - Life has never been better for Pankaj Srivastava, a tall, soft-voiced insurance manager. He surpassed his business targets and has been promoted twice. His company sends him to conferences all over India and is rewarding him with a three-day vacation in Dubai.
But the faster he rises, the more anxious he gets.
"I am in the big league now. But everybody at this level speaks English, and I don't," Srivastava said in a mix of Hindi and broken English. "I stay in hotels where even the waiters speak English. At the conferences, I stay quiet because I don't want them to laugh at my English."
So for a week, he attended a conversational English class at an establishment called Uma's English Academy.
India has a reputation as a nation of fluent English speakers, but by many estimates, only 5 percent of the population merits that description. Now, a five-year-long economic boom has triggered a rush to bring the reality into line with the lore. Once the preserve of big-city elites, English is spreading to the hinterlands.
Bhopal, a provincial city of more than 1.5 million, is now thick with storefront schools that promise English proficiency.
In the classroom at Uma's English Academy, Srivastava sat alongside MBA and engineering students, computer salesmen, and credit card executives. Some were locals and some were rural folk fresh in from the villages.
They learn prepositions and sentence formation and baffling rules about when to say "a little" rather than "little," "beside" rather than "besides," and "from" rather than "of."
"In this classroom, nobody . . . is laughing on my English. I not afraid of mistakes; everybody is weak in English here," Srivastava said, smiling as he struggled to speak exclusively in the still-strange tongue.
Helping to drive this trend is the sense that financial success isn't enough; the perception lingers that social status comes only with true comfort in English.
"You are judged differently as soon as you speak English in India. My students' inability to speak in English dwarfs their self-confidence," said Uma Shanker, who runs the academy. "Everybody has a dream now in India, and English is central to that dream."
Some Indians call this an embarrassing hangover from 200 years of British rule. Some say that whatever its origin, India's strength in the language is a trump card in a globalizing world.
Others argue that it is all going too far. The popular Indian news magazine Outlook ran a cover story last month decrying the "English speaking curse."
"English is increasingly becoming a source of anxiety, even despair, for those attempting to cross the boundaries separating those who 'have' English from those who don't," the article said. It cited four recent suicides by students unable to compete in a college system where all the textbooks are in English.
Sometimes the anxiety is more benign. A recent television ad by a Chennai-based English-teaching center called Veta showed a middle-class teenage boy sleeping over his books while a maid in a sari cleans the floor, humming a song in English. The boy wakes up in shock; in this class-conscious society, he can't believe that his social inferior speaks English.
Last month, an entertainment TV channel launched a show called "Angrezi Mein Kehte Hain" (In English, We Say), set in an English-language classroom.
"As India progresses, English has become a power tool," said Shailja Kejriwal, the channel's executive vice president.
