Pride of ancestry is the hope for the future. Especially more so of civilizations which had a very rich cultural heritage [even judged by the worst enemy] and a great ancestry and that heritage and ancestry have got either wiped out, kept in abeyance by inimical forces, suppressed etc due to various reasons like natural calamity, dirty wars, colonization and any such negative forces. There is a justifiable euphoria when there are signs, symptoms or serious processes of resurrection of such rich cultural heritage.

But having said that resorting to over generalizations of inevitable and intricate variety which was either part of that rich heritage or which grew as a carapace of accretions to life, over simplification of very complex things , getting into modes of frenzied , hyper emotionally charged chauvinistic zeal coupled with an euphoria over resurrecting relevance and highlighting it as if it the most wonderful thing ever to have happened and the greatest addition to life over everything else that has existed and was part of life are indicators of mass hysteria.

The greatest calamity of all mass hysteria is the half baked youth who can easily get carried away.

This is happening among certain sections of the population of India now with utter hypocrisy because what they praise so much in public they cannot afford to follow in their private or personal life because practically it is of less relevance and utility in the scheme of things as they are and for life as it is lived today.

Atlas has really shrugged for good so that there is a comparatively greater sense feeling being part of human race as a whole rather than a fanatical sense of belonging or clinging on to a particular clan or outfit.

In fact in the present day any group which gets over enthusiastically cocooned into such narrow schemes loses a lot in real life.

This big preamble is for people who go over gaga over someone taking oath in Sanskrit, Hindi being promoted as a language of national identity and with a sudden found love of Sanskrit and a craze for promoting a single language, namely Hindi for being identified as an Indian and the concomitant craze by many other linguistic chauvinists to clamour for making primary education compulsory in a mother tongue? All these coupled with pouring venom on Macaulay’s system as the cause for all our ills and slow growth.

I have placed a question mark after mother tongue why? I know a happy loving couple [rarity] the boy a Gujarathi and the girl a Telugu and they live at Chennai . Their child speaks Gujarathi, Telugu and of course Tamil picked up from the maids attending to her and the loving couples in their practical wisdom have been educating the child in a school where the medium is English. Now the father is likely to get transferred to Germany.

Now tell me is Macaulay’s system or his gift of English education a curse or a boon? How many of you who have praised Sushma Swaraj for her taking oath in Sanskrit would like to get your children educated in Sanskrit medium schools? What scriptures in Sanskrit you can make a critical analysis in Sanskrit? Those couples and the poor child would have benefitted had it been forced to have its primary education in Tamil because they happen to work in Tamil nadu? Or if they happen to work in Bangalore make the child have its primary education in Kannada?

I think such fanaticism in the present day life is both illogical and ill placed and can cause immense damage to the very development of the individual as well as the society.

If civilization has conjured up either for good or bad to make English a global language and the pursuit of higher education, economic activities, scientific knowledge banks and even decent survival hinge on one’s ability to communicate in English why should we shun it. If Kannada or Tamil or Bengali do not have such a wide acceptance beyond the confines of a particular state, these languages do not lose their value or importance nor does it mean that their literature has vanished but it is a fact that these languages have not been able to penetrate beyond their geographical borders a big full stop there, that’s all.

This does not in any way mean that English is the best or greatest among languages. But as a said earlier the stride of civilization has placed her at an advantageous position there is no point in being jealous about it or envy it.

Language, after all, primarily is a tool for communication.

Just a week ago on 29th May,2014 Times of India newspaper carried a central page article titled ‘HAPPY TO BE UNHAPPY’ BY Suman Chattopadhyay how insisting and enforcing for some decades Bengali medium has caused economic and cultural disadvantage for the Bengali youth.

Every language is an art and science of very vast dimension carrying within it several years of civilization with all its splendor, the experiences of many souls, expressions of many lives and as such each language is a vast store house of both art and science. In short each language on earth is a divine tool or probably the best medium to express our thoughts and experiences. But primarily it is just a tool for communication.