As the rupee rises

It is rather curious; the effects relative economic growth can have on things. Take the Chinese, for example. From being one of the forgotten, forbidden lands, only thought of as exemplifying Oriental inscrutability, the dragon is more and more seen as such. With once-imperious foreign governments backing away quietly on a host of issues when faced with Chinese economic muscle. As well as paying more attention to the language and culture. Indeed, a UK study had discovered that quite a few of the elite set wanted their kids to learn Mandarin as the foreign language of choice, instead of say, French. So, now that India has become one of the better-ranked economies in the world, watched by the whole world, just what can we foresee for ourselves? Already, with the finance minister’s Budget speech mention of the hunt for a suitable sign for the hitherto humble rupee to match the pound, dollar, yen and euro (an I crossed in the middle, maybe?) we can evince signs of envisaging future prominence. But what about language? Will there possibly be a time when we can have western kids learning ‘Indian’ ?

Which is probably where things will come full circle. Now, most of us are bi- or multi-lingual by necessity anyway . And still a tad amused by the stereotype of the foreign tourist negotiating the hurly-burly with a twanged namaste or a theek hai — at least up north. But since we aren’t quite settled on the language issue, which possible one could the people wanting a share of the Indian economic pie possibly learn? Maybe you can get by in the chief economic zones in China with Mandarin, but how on earth can any foreign businessman negotiate the lingua franca across our multiple zones with yet more submultiplicity in each. Imagine then, the sound of public school kids, say, in the UK, sing-songing the soft and hard consonants in Tamil, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi et al. Or would they settle, instead, for official recognition of English as really being Indian now, a familiar sort of foreign language? The tongue follows the money, what?