If Indians did not know English, would India be a IT superpower?

[echarcha]

A comment by another eCharcha Zen on a different topic made me wonder if Indians could be everywhere in the world in the field of IT if Indians did not communicate in English?

Would all the Silicon Valley tech giants and other places set up shop in India? Would we be much better off without English after 50 plus years of independence from British colonial rule?

Would just having one language like Hindi have proved beneficial today?

Please do think about it without getting sentimental about Hindi or any other Indian language for that matter.

[desichacha]

no way.

Thanks to all those babus and south indian lawyers who kept their bosses legacy and taught this language with *pride* to their kids rather than what was told was their *national* language

[GpeL]

Although I am a big hindi fan.. a bigger HINDI fan than any person whose MT is hindi. (I even stopped speaking to my uncle who Insisted I speak to him only in my mother tongue or he would not respond). and I speak better hindi than someone whose MT is hindi, I have to say that English is more important and relevant now as it has become the worlds business language. So as much as Zendu likes to misspell and not use commas and fullstop, much to his chagrin, English will remain the language for all uses barring bakarchodi for time to come.

A relevant article.. Read this and tell me how true it is.


http://www.samachar.com/features/140803-features.html

[vakil sahib]

love it or hate it english is the most important language in the world. without knowledge of english, indian IT workers would not have had a chance to go to the US.

nor would foreign companies have outsourced work to india.

the english language is perhaps the only good thing the angrez gave to us. that does not mean we should not continue to swear at them, of course

we are going to use their language and our manpower to overtake them economically in the very near future

[echarcha]

Originally posted by GpeL
Although I am a big hindi fan.. a bigger HINDI fan than any person whose MT is hindi. (I even stopped speaking to my uncle who Insisted I speak to him only in my mother tongue or he would not respond). and I speak better hindi than someone whose MT is hindi, I have to say that English is more important and relevant now as it has become the worlds business language. So as much as Zendu likes to misspell and not use commas and fullstop, much to his chagrin, English will remain the language for all uses barring bakarchodi for time to come.

A relevant article.. Read this and tell me how true it is.


http://www.samachar.com/features/140803-features.html

Bhai mere.. I too love Hindi. I love Hindi movies. I love my mother tongue Marathi too.

but in a practical world, one has to know the language most common for business. Infact the Chinese are learning English now rapidly so as to compete with India for IT offshoring and other jobs like call centers.

I understand that Zen loves to rile up sentiments here by saying things to the effect that "US is capitalistic and we are all caught up in a materialistic maze" and "We are slaves of English and did not accept Hindi.." etc etc. But deep in his heart he knows too that without English he would not have reached where he is and without capitalism there would be no innovation in business and technology.

[dirty]

FYI



http://www.echarcha.com/forum/showth...threadid=10250

[BKN]

Originally posted by echarcha
if Indians could be everywhere in the world in the field of IT if Indians did not communicate in English?

Read this... Just 2% market share in S/W Industry by India!!!

NEW DELHI, Feb. 5 (Xinhuanet) -- Indian IT tycoon N. R. Narayana Murthy said Thursday that after two decades of being in the information technology business, India is still a "toddler" with only two percent of global market share.


http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/20...nt_1301467.htm

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/c...how/477627.cms

[King]

Originally posted by desichacha
no way.

Thanks to all those babus and south indian lawyers who kept their bosses legacy and taught this language with *pride* to their kids rather than what was told was their *national* language

At the risk of derailing this thread -- who has the right to tell anyone that this is your national language and you have to learn it ? Was Hindi decided taking into account the wishes of all Indians ? Will learning Hindi benefit anyone living in a village in South India?

Thank goodness we have English.. The concept of a national language does not apply easily to India. I don't think any other country in the whole world has anything akin to India in terms of the number of languages spoken and how different the languages are. Hence I don't think there can be a National language for India from a pride/nationalistic point of view.

And how do you know that the South Indian lawyers did not teach their mother tongues first to their kids and then move on to English as this is the most practical choice?

[Zen]

Bhai log

use the search function and dig out for yourself!

this beat up topic is discussed earlier - I have no problem about any indian language becoming the national language of India but I do believe that we sould have one language of our own playing that role - does it mean that I am agaist learning and speaking English - Heck no! I wish I knew each and every language out there. Every language has a lot to offer.

For those who love to quote Gandhi to validate their arguement - Takalu wanted hindi to be the national language. He was a gujju and my mother tongue is not hindi either but I don't know what the f.. the southies have up their's that they never give up in favor of hindi but love to lick english asses- pushtainee aadat.

Talking about speaking english correctly, majority of southies espacially from andhra and tamilians from non-matros suck big time - I mean horrendous! accent kee to poochho hee mat - maachudi padee hai - yukkchulee sam baadeee fraaam dair village can ondastaand aanlee!

This article is by some unknown lawdu M V Kamath - dude is a chewunistic prejudist south-indian himself - who cares about his bakarchaudi anyways!

[Ravi]

cha pai,
First of all, India is not an IT superpower. We have 8% of IT income comming into the country. Remaining 92% remains to be explored yet. But the good news is that, with 8% we have, we are able to place a strong foundation for the future to come.

Now, comming to your question,
Knowing English has definitely helped India surge ahead of Brazil, and emerging east european countries. But again, it is just an initial headstart and doesn't mean much in long term. The challenge however, is to keep the momentup up in future which I find something difficult as most Brazilians and east europeans are rapidly learning English, and will pose a definite threat to Indian IT outsourcing.
But then, the computers are binary, and they don't understand either English or Sanskrit. Majority of software written in Europe, for example, is not in english, and Europe does make some serious contributions to open source. India hasn't matched west in that scene. Infact, Brazilians make more contribution that Indians do, to open souce (and also to cutting edge virus/ anti-virus software). Indian programmers are more or less like Mexicans working in American McDonalds who work hard, do unskilled work, and get no credit. Most of Indian software is unskilled, and definitely not bordering on the cutting edge.

Even though IT has captured the imagination of India, there is still a long way to go. None of major s/w companies are indians. Microsoft, Siebel, SAP for example. Unless India has value added products, there is pretty much nothing we can do. English certainly helps us, but we got to keep the mastery of domain knowledge.

[GunsNRoses]

Like it or not, English is the language of technology today (even though the French hate to admit it). Sure you can develop a word processor or webpage for your native language, but development tools, compilers and OS code has always been in English and the situation is not going to change in the near future.

Evidence of this should be easy to find.... not one of Linus Torvalds comments in the Linux kernel is in Swedish (his mother tongue) or Finnish (his country's first language). He himself is the first to admit that he did it that way because it was the easiest for collaborating with other people. A lot of Japanese, Koreans and Chinese people work on the BSD projects. The Kame IPv6 project is almost entirely run by Japanese researchers. Mind you, most of these countries don't have English offered as widely as India does. However *all of them* have made it a point to study English, just so that they could share their work with others easily. In the KAME project, discussion notes that the developers send each other are in English, even if the researchers involved in the discussion are all Japanese!

Also, your average non-technical Chinese webuser knows enough English to type a web address, because like it or not, even though we've had Unicode support for domain names forever, you don't see any non-English character domain names. Even the European countries (such as France, Germany etc.) don't pick domain names with characters that are not in the English alphabet (such as accented e or n).

Incidentally I'm reminded of a certain rather famous premier Indian Engineering University which suddenly decided to allow candidates the option to write the supertough entrance exam in their mother tongue. With this idea in mind, the administrators passed a form around to every professor asking what languages they could grade answers in. My dad put in 3 or 4 languages in the form with the caveat that he would grade the papers provided that they supplied a list of technical terms and their equivalents in English .

[YedaAnna]

Now one more kochan.
Wat wud have been the state of affairs if india had only one language?

Say like most of the non-english speaking nations like korea,japan,china,the EU etc. have. Have our languages indirectly contributed to our lag?

[Zen]

so, Where are we so far?

Ravi - The knowlege of a common language of communication and computer skills are two different things, Indians may speak good English but their contribution as a fundamental reseacher is not significant. Their achievments are not very big because they are lesser experts.

G&R - English is important because the fundamental researchers coming from different parts of the world need a common language to communicate . Indians may not be great researchers but the did benifit from the fact that they could communicate with a bigger pool of experts.

Yeda - OK.. so it means that more language = more problems?

Now this is healty discussion damn it!

This is what I feel -

1) Indian from different states have egoistic attachments to their regional languages which create conflict among themselves. This egistic attachment was never directed towards the national achievements and creating something on their own.

2) Indians were never rulers of any other parts of the world. With almost no or insignificant knowledge base, no innovations or contribution to the modern science they remained collective copycats and followes of the imposed language and borrowed knowledge. They lost faith in their ancient knowledge and lanuages of their own bacause it did not serve any contemporary purpose.

3) Even with less than 8% market share of IT and limited knowledge of the real technology, Indians cannot stop themselves from bragging about it and we feel good that we were very good follower that's why we have come so far! Now it can't get more spinless than this!!

4) An Indian laughs at another Indian for not speaking or writing correct English but they have no shame in accepting that they do not have a national language of their. Indians still try to prove that we don't need one! Why? Because English makes tapping into foreign knowledge base easy and we can conveniently remain good followers!

balihaari hai ... this is my moment of zen ... this is my feel good factor ... mera bharat mahaan!

If things were done my way -

The nation should talk in english and decide how to put it in its place - not in our hearts but in the books and for the business with foreigners. Just like you use shoes when you are out of home but you don't put them near the pleace of worship!

There should be one national language - close to heart, respected and known by all.

One step at a time - Just like a respectable nation, Hindi nirdesh ke liye "ek" dabaeeye yaa press 2 for english.

Have self esteem, work hard and stand together with one solid representaion. we got to take the lead someday - work for that day and you'll feel smart that you are seen as a strong self respecting nation.

people won't respect you more than your respect for yourself.

lage to sahee ki desh ki apanee kuchh ijjat hai khud ki nigaah mey

[tony]

Originally posted by echarcha
A comment by another eCharcha Zen on a different topic made me wonder if Indians could be everywhere in the world in the field of IT if Indians did not communicate in English?

Would all the Silicon Valley tech giants and other places set up shop in India? Would we be much better off without English after 50 plus years of independence from British colonial rule?

Would just having one language like Hindi have proved beneficial today?

Please do think about it without getting sentimental about Hindi or any other Indian language for that matter.

English has had its role in development of India and success of Indians but, I don't think that knowing English is the primary reason for Indians' success or my success.

I think good spoken English is NOT absolutely necessary to succeed in the US. Of course knowing good english helps, but one cannot succeed just on the basis of good english. When I came to US, I, like many other desis, knew little english ... but I had SAP background in India and the market was hot and I got hired ... Initially some of the bosses even told my dalal that they had trouble understanding me ... so what? I immediately realized my weakness and cut down on verbal commmunication. Instead, when someone called me, asked something, I would say "let me get back to you" and I would carefully type out a detailed e-mail response. They would respond to the e-mail by another e-mail and soon my bad english was not an issue .. I swithched jobs, clients and with time learned better english and today I can guarantee that I make 1.5 to 2 times what you (admin) are making - someone who claims to have gone to catholic school.

Dude, it is not about english .. it is about your tech skills, those who know good english become tech writers ...when they have been doing it all their life they become senior tech writers ... but if good english was that important, this country would not have gone to India to recruit IT people there are lot of good english speaking people right here who don't have a job and will accept a lower salary than us Indians ... English helps but is less important than the skills required to do your IT job.

[Gand Mein Bambu]

Originally posted by tony
English helps but is less important than the skills required to do your IT job.

sau taka barabar