About ten months back, on this very blog, I had commented that there is a severe crunch of good English speakers these days, especially among the youth we talk to and meet in our everyday lives. It was very refreshing indeed to see that last week, Chetan Bhagat opined on this very issue in an editorial on TOI.
The fan-following and the literary stature that Bhagat enjoys among Indian youth are bound to trigger an earnest effort on the part of the latter to improve their English speaking and writing skills. Chetan, in that column itself, has also suggested ways on how to improve one’s ability to use and apply the language cogently and in a very simple manner. For me, that column is a highly recommended piece of reading.
There is still a high proportion of young kids in our country who have no option but to study in non-english speaking schools, thanks to the lack of vision and the atrocities of the responsible authorities including parents. Learning the English laguage well becomes all the more imperative for these kids, because they have to put in that extra bit of hard work and inconvenience compared to their more fortunate counterparts who study in english-speaking schools.
Bhagat’s ideas may not yield results overnight, because good spoken English is a process rather than an event. You need time to master it. However, such good advice is always worth considering, especially if it comes from somebody who is a master of writing the most enthralling of novels in the simplest of words.
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