Whether it is Ajay Devgan voicing these dialogues in Bol Bachchan, or Mr. Bachchan himself declaring english to be a 'phunny' language in the 80s, Indians have somehow always managed to make a parody of the English language. Is it because it is too hard to master the white man's language? Or, basking in the lineage of Panini¹ who Chomsky² considers as the originator of linguistics, we consider the unstructured English language no better than a parad'ox'y in itself!

Whatever the reason be, the truth remains that having good English is an important ingredient for Indians to be globally competitive and unfortunately quite a few schooled Indians still make a parody of the language. Aspiring Minds' study³ on the language skills of engineering population showed disturbing results. We found that more than 52% engineers did not know the meaning of words like cease, generic and tentative. Around 46% engineers make 'has/had' mistakes whereas 31% of them cannot comprehend simple meaning of written text.

We are not only concerned about the shrinking talent pool for the IT outsourcing industry, but questions is how does this populace understand the four year engineering curriculum which is all in English? There is a lot of money going down the drain for the five lakh+ parents who want to see their kids as engineers (quick back of envelope calc: 5l engg *50% English deficient * 4L fee = 10,000 crores). This problem needs to be addressed immediately. English cannot be a selection criteria for engineering studies since this will further exacerbate the social divide. English deficiency needs to be diagnosed in the first year and be bridged in the first semester to enable the students to understand the engineering studies ahead. IITs have been doing similar bridge courses with some success for a part of their disadvantaged students. This is something to learn from them. Not only would it benefit the student and corporations, but the overall health of our economy.

When an article on our English report appeared on rediff.com, I read a distraught comment, "but why is English needed for doing good engineering?" I could relate to the anguish of the young man. Conducting interviews for Aspiring Minds, I have come across and hired excellent programmers who did not speak good English (strangely our interview process was called unprofessional on a popular website because we used "hinglish"). Good English is necessary for roles such as those in IT outsourcing industry, which form a very sizeable part of employment for engineers today .But then, there are important jobs and tasks for these programming geeks in the nation, which is in itself a large consumer of technology driven products. It is thus unfortunate that we have repeatedly found that for most companies, English is one of the strongest correlate to interview success even in non-client facing programming roles. We need to drop English as a proxy for smartness, simply because it is not!

To conclude, notwithstanding the parody or parodoxy of the English language, we need good English to be globally competitive and the required efforts and investment for it needs to be made early on in the career of the student. On the other hand, we need to see beyond English when we hire pure-play technology folks. The solution to our problems lies right within us and we do not need to depend on the global economy to grow 8% and beyond: solution in armpit, hyper noise pollution in the Nation!