Mastery of English language ensures mobility within this vast country as our young people start looking for jobs, and regardless of how many tongues they have at their command, English will continue to have high currency with employers when it comes to lucrative jobs.
I was fortunate to grow up in a place that was teeming with languages. During my college years in Calcutta, it was common practice for groups of students to gather at tea stalls and coffee shops in the evenings to engage in arguments and discussions about a plethora of topics.
The owner of the tea stall that I frequented with my friends spoke Punjabi; my best friend and many others in our group spoke Hindi, which was my first language in high school.
All of us were fluent in Bengali and English, and some of my friends indulged in dashes of French trying to brush up for the next day's language class at the French embassy.
Our daily ritual, which went by the name "adda," was thus a veritable feast of languages.
The only time we would defer to a particular language was out of courtesy and politeness if we had someone in our midst who could not connect with any of the languages that were in use.
The natural choice then was English. The Indian Constitution recognizes Hindi as the national language, but the lingua franca in India is really English.
At home, I spoke Tamil.
Even though I spoke many languages to varying degrees of proficiency, I always understood that English was sui generis among the group for its global implications. When I left for England, I resolved that I would speak and write English better than any Englishman.
Much of my ambition derived from my love for the language, but a substantial part resided in the notion that I should master the language of the country where I planned to work and, perhaps, live.
Multilingualism should be treated as routine, and we don't need special programs to bring it to fruition.
If American schools are floundering with language instruction, it is because their focus is on transitioning students from one language to another, with the underlying implication that the language transitioned from would eventually lose academic focus and be jettisoned. Any reasonable mind would surely have a quarrel with such a proposition.
Read the rest of the article here: http://www.elpasotimes.com/opinion/ci_25581621/more-languages-are-better-but-english-is-paramount
Ramnath Subramanian, a retired public-school teacher, writes for the El Paso Times on educational topics. E-mail address: marianramm@yahoo.com