Indians' Suicide Pact with English Pronunciation

Have you ever lost someone to suicide? In a country with one of the highest incidences of suicide, it is inevitable that we personally know someone who thought that death was the only option left.

Well, I have. Both in my family and student communities. It hurts. It takes a piece of your soul, or it feels like that at that time, but I do think it helps you grow more aware, more sensitive and strangely more outspoken than ever before. If you have ever been on a suicide watch, you would know what I mean.

I get the reason why someone might be driven to suicide. And I do not mean clinical depression. That is another topic altogether and it needs to be addressed, but by better-qualified people than me. I know, because I know people who have been, who are battling this disease. And it is a disease, not a state of mind or a matter of grit. Anyway, enough said. Another day, perhaps.

As I was saying, I have lost people I know to suicide. As an English language teacher teaching college students, often first-generation learners or kids who have switched from the vernacular medium to the English one just that year for the first time or were in a so-called English medium school, but were taught in primarily the local dialect; as a corporate trainer training young and old professionals who felt diminished because they did not know English, as a teaching aide in underprivileged, underserved areas helping either social workers or children or adults who felt brushed aside just because they could not communicate in English; as a human being with the tools of trade that granted me access to the inner circles of power (not the innermost, but at least a segment of it) because my English was considered good enough that I became worthy because I could wield this tool, I have been becoming increasingly aghast at how far we still have to go.

I have had several webinars on English Language teaching these past few weeks and consistently I have been asked "How do we improve pronunciation?" In a world so rid with illness, be that poverty or bigotry against women, Blacks or Dalits or migrants and so on, the question that haunts is not how to improve thinking, but how to improve spellings and pronunciation. Because the cosmetic is easier to change? Because the cosmetic is all that we can focus upon? Because the cosmetic is all that we care about? Because this illness of superficiality is more insidious, more virulent and more deeply infecting us than any strain of the coronavirus could be?

To get back to the thought I began with, this is why I have lost a few people, I won't take names and I won't give numbers. Because while I lost a few to quitting this world, I have lost a few to retiring from life, from hope. I still hope they may find in themselves a zest for living again, but for now, they have let the essence of them die. Their dreams. Their hopes. Their talents. Their personalities. Their feeling of being equal to anyone.

Why? Well, essentially because they could not wield English as a weapon to chisel people's perception of them as talented human beings of worth. So in colleges and offices and campaign fundraisers they were cast aside since they did not speak the lingo, not as the narrow-minded upper echelon understands English.

Have you ever tried thinking in a language alien to you? Or even not the one that you are primarily familiar with? Try expressing your thoughts in that language and just experience ideas vanish from your head as if they never were. Go back to that mother tongue that you seemingly know and try articulating complex thoughts of your profession in that language. Let's see you try. And then talk of how English can be easily learnt and that those who are complaining are just not trying hard enough.

Look at what I wrote above. I subsumed even the trauma of those individuals that I could not help and parlayed it into my own suffering of having to deal with their angst. Truly. And that is my point, very often we are so consumed with how people, things, events make us feel that we forget the greater meaning, the depth that underlies these interactions. Humanity. Thought. Not a mere tool for communication, one of many at that.

Indians are obsessed with pronunciation, but do we want to speak Nigerian English? No. Not even Australian. We only look to our former political colonisers, the British and our current capitalist colonisers, the Americans to speak the lingo of power. By the way, the pronunciations we want to emulate are located in the financial and political centres of power even within the nations of the UK and the US.

We do not want to think of how to improve meaning-making and aid critical literacy. We want to work on handwriting and pronunciation. And we wonder what is wrong with our education system and our society.

- Written on 27 June 2020

- Self-explanatory, but is triggered by Sushant Singh Rajput's death having some of us reminisce about the lives lost to the choice of suicide and today marking the anniversary of someone who had chosen this path.