Dear Mr Roychoudhury
It also looks to me like a ploy preparatory to the next rounds of general elections. Well, Ms Mamata Banerjee is an astute politician Yes, as Indians we know very well the history of our languages in India. We guard our language like a worker bee guarding its hive from predators. It is an integral part of our culture. Urdu is already one of the Constitutional languages of India; it is rich in history and culture; it is modern and is spoken by a great many people of India spread over the entire subcontinent. The knowledge of another language is an additional qualification and anybody can make a living out of it.One can even aspire to become a Professor of the subject. Very recently I posted a few emails: one of that mail was headed Are bilinguals cleverer than the monolinguals? Another email dealt with the trilinguals (the wording of the subject headings may be a little different from mine in those mails. A friend of mine here, an Assamese lady, works as interpreter in the Sylheti language. Funnily enough Sylheti is sort of officially recognised language in the United Kingdom. Non-Sylheti speaking Bengalese are debarred from certain Community-related positions under the Boroughs. During my perambulations in Delhi, some forty years ago, I found that official records in a Police station were kept in Urdu. It was usual to find a free Urdu newspaper in the small restaurants for the customers to read. Once I met an Editor of a Hindi fortnightly journal who was not able to read or write Hindi. The Bengalese living in a number of cities in Uttar Pradesh, do not know Bengali well. Whether we like it or not, we in India live in a multilingual, multicultural society. I would not like to predict the political future of the North-East India right now. -bhuban _______________________________________________ assam mailing list assam@assamnet.org http://assamnet.org/mailman/listinfo/assam_assamnet.org
