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Enescil, a Brazilian engineering firm requires Engineers, Architects and Draftsmen, proficient in AutoCAD, for their new office in Goa Those interested can email enescil....@gmail.com by 15 November 2011 Selected candidates will be sent to Brazil for 2 months training --------------------------------------------------------------------------- One cannot but disagree with Selma on her perspective below. The cut-and-paste quilt of various facts and info-tidbits, while not incorrect in the details, presents a wholly misleading picture of the situation as it is. Even before Selma posted this, I happened to come across this Guardian story of how the disempowered in India see English as a road to upwardly mobility. It would be a big mistake, in my view, to dump the baby with the bathwater. Or to be obsessed about "low standards". See India's outcasts put faith in English Dalits are building a temple in honour of a language they believe can liberate them from the oppressions of the caste system http://bit.ly/ttjjMS While Selma could get access to the Queen's English (whether in the Gulf or the UK), most of us will have to make do with the Hinglish or Konklish version of it. And why not? It has served us well, it allows us to communicate, and it enables us to earn a livelihood. In any case, India is going to become the country with the largest English speaking population in the world. Currently we are at #2, after the US, but ahead of the Philippines. I think these figures could be underestimates: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-speaking_population So, while we might speak it badly, we'll simply have the chance of calling it Indian English, or Goan English (if you have Singlish in Singapore, why not!). As Jose Colaco has argued elsewhere, I too agree that the Goan women are better than us guys in speaking English. Or maybe writing it too. (They're generally better in all the language departments.) Maybe it is a problem when some try to affect 'foreign' accents, instead of just going 'natural' and speaking as they do, in intelligible English. On the weekend, we had a talk in Goa by the ex-Principal of Sophia College, Sr Mary Braganza. Institutions like this and St Xavier's (in Bombay) have shaped a generation and more of Goan women and men leaders of society. Perhaps the fact that we have so few institutions of excellence here, and that those who get their education here, spend the best part of their lives overseas, also adds to the problem. Added to this, we get told off by the Selmas for our poor standards, which is like pouring salt (or vinegar) into one's wounds! We should not see the glass as half-empty, but rather as half-full. There would be many who have done well for themseves in Goa, and from Goa, in the world of English. Just that we have maybe not spent time to list them: QUOTE Spoken Indian English is often the butt of jokes by "educated" British, American and Indian English-speakers alike as is evidenced by such characters as Peter Sellers' Indian party-goer in the movie The Party and the Simpsons' convenience-store owner Apu Nahasapeemapetilon; there is also no dearth of jokes among Indians 'riffing' the pronunciation and idiomatic inconsistencies of Indian English (see External Links at bottom). However, in spite of banter regarding colloquial English, India has a consistent and long record of pre- and post-Independence thinkers and writers whose writings and speeches are attestations to many Indians' absolute mastery of the language. Among others, Swami Vivekananda, Rabindranath Tagore, C Rajagopalachari,Shri Aurobindo Ghosh, Jawaharlal Nehru, the world-famous novelist R K Narayan, and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan come to mind as prominent figures whose English, often though not always written, was of the highest quality in any country. Many more contemporary Indians, such as Vikram Seth and Salman Rushdie, are acknowledged masters of English literary style. Indian English writers and English writers of Indian origin – notably Booker Prize winners Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy – have in addition made creative use of more stereotypical Indian English through the mouths of characters in their works. http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Indian_English ENDQUOTE I do agree with the problems we've long faced with English-language publications (and even books) in Goa. We've been suffering this (or, should I say, the readers have been suffering it) since the 1980s, as far as I know. Veteran journalists like Lambert Mascarenhas recently said it was a bigger disaster in the 1960s, when Portuguese typesetters were required to work in the English language overnight. [http://www.archive.org/details/VeniVidi...Goa] But this probably has more to do with economics, a lack of resources, limited time-frame, and a lack of commitment to quality (amidst all of us), rather than not knowing the English language itself. For me, I'm grateful that a small region which barely had direct British rule (if you exclude the occupation of Goa by British troops, under the Napoleanic excuses), managed to overnight take to English. We had Portuguese dominating till 1961, a spell of English after that, Marathiwadism in the 1960s, Konkani (Devanagari, that too) since 1987. That Goa and Goans have come so far in the field of English is a matter of pride. Not a case for derision. FN PS: A must-read book: Dennis Kurzon trying to understand why people who claim their mother tongue is Konkani have among the highest TOEFL scores in the world: Where East looks West: success in English in Goa and on the Konkan Coast By Dennis Kurzon http://bit.ly/tlv0Py Many other migration-prone communities are also shifting over to English and a long-term investment... Goans did it a bit earlier in the day. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Protect Goa's natural beauty Support Goa's first Tiger Reserve Sign the petition at: http://www.goanet.org/petition/petition.php ---------------------------------------------------------------------------