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Snobbery and the English language

I was raised by an English Professor and therefore, have been around books since my childhood. I was made to write long essays in English whenever I had a new or unique experience. Most of our bedtime stories were read out from children's books written in English. Given my environment and my inherent nature, my favorite pass-time as a kid was reading novels. Therefore, it was from a very young age that I started understanding or imbibing the importance of writing and speaking grammatically correct sentences. I was corrected every time I said an incorrect sentence. 

I will forever be grateful for having learnt good writing and speaking in the English language. That has indeed helped me in my career. But gradually, as I grew up and without even my knowledge, I became a snob. I started judging those who could not speak impeccable English. I thought these people were not well educated or had performed poorly in school. I was a good student and this snobbishness stayed with me through college. When I look back, I realize that I sub-consciously only made friends with those who were good in English. Everyone else was obviously beneath me! Hah! How wrong was I!

I was a science student and was fortunate enough to have gotten into Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore for my Masters and PhD. That is when I got a reality check. I saw that most of my classmates were not well versed in the English language. Yet, they performed better than me in exams. How was that possible?! Until then, I had always correlated good English with good understanding of science subjects as well. Also, had I not qualified the written exam and two rounds of interviews to make it into IISc. How was it then that I was not doing as well. But, I failed to realize that everyone else too had gone through the same rigorous selection process. And now it was a case of all the top students put up in the same place competing against each other. Soon, I realized that understanding a concept had nothing to do with knowing English. In fact, some of my classmates were able to explain the concepts in Hindi/Bangla with such clarity that I realized I needed to spend more time with my books. Well, how I got better at my science is a story for another day.

But, what I realized that first semester was that my entire life until then had gone by looking down on people and thinking of myself as someone great, just because I could converse in better English than most. Being better at a language has nothing to do with clarity of thought. If you know something well, you will be able to convey that to the other person, no matter what. On the other hand, if you don't know something, no matter how many novels you've read and how good your vocabulary is, you will not be able to convey anything. Only when you meet people from different regions and ethnicities, you realize how overrated a particular language can be.

In India, we give a lot of importance to the English language. It has indeed become a global language and being good at it does give you some leverage in your life and career. But, you should realize that you yourself can come across as stupid when you give it more importance than it deserves. So yes, try to speak correctly, try to improve your writing, read the novels and the articles, but do not think that you are above all just based off that. You still need to work on your core domain of work, be it science or tech or anything else. Understand that the language you speak does not override the depth of your knowledge, ever! 

xxRS

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