Sunday, April 09, 2006

taking the poor to IIT's doorsteps...

here is one more heart-warming story that aims for equality of opportunity instead of taking a short-cut to creating equality of outcome. clearly, providing many with the wherewithal to success is better than spoonfeeding success to a lucky few. remember the tale abt teaching to fish than feeding fish? here is an example

Being turned off by foreign accents...

If you pay for a product (and hence, the associated customer service usually provided over phone), is it okay to demand that the service is in a particular language? Sure, service in an unintelligible language is not service at all. Is it okay to demand that the language be spoken in a particular accent? Why not? This looks like a case of the (retail) market deciding how the English language should be spoken.

This article notes how companies are encouraging customers to post their complaints online, so that with written responses, the accent issue can be overcome. Soon, it will be a case of the market deciding how the English language should be written too... As someone who prefers English English to American English (analyse, not analyze for example), I find this a sad but inevitable development. But this will not be a one-sided development. I feel that non-American accents will be increasingly accepted in that uniquely assimilative way that has made America what it is today!

Saturday, April 08, 2006

old world and new, faith and despair, hope and surrender...

this being the season of great(!) debates and demonstrations on the issue of immigration, here is a book recommendation. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits by Laila Lalami looks at the issue from an immigrant's point of view. in fact, from the points of view of 4 entirely unrelated persons travelling by the same boat from Morocco to Spain - would-be illegal immigrants with their own motivations and with differing results. one also gets a good idea of life in North Africa (Morocco). the novel is very easy to read, making it very difficult to put it down! very rarely do i read a novel at home, unless i am about to compelete it. but this was different.

Laila Lalami also runs a very interesting blog (www.moorishgirl.com). the blog also includes a lot of her political views, but just the literary elements make it an interesting read.

Sunday, April 02, 2006

Even so it remains pidgin, although our own....

Most Indians spk English almost as a first language. But just as UK and US are two nations separated by a common language, India and the rest of the English speaking world are separated by what is a "common" language. Obviously, at an operational level, English is common across the world. But that is a very restrictive use of a language. Karan Thapar has written a fascinating article on how Indian English sounds so different from the English that the English speak. One can say the same of US English or of written English across the world. There is really no need to speak English like the English or the Americans any longer (I remember this was a major aspiration for many of us couple of decades back), to be respected for one's knowledge of English.

There is one point that Karan makes here, that I find difficult to believe. He says that Indians use beautiful idioms when speaking their native tongues (Bengali, Hindi, etc.). Really?! Most Hindi and Tamil speakers I know (hey, that includes me)speak an irritating mix of the native and the "foreign" languages that is truly pidgin! Obviously, very functional and practical, but not really beautiful.