Kind of a follow up to my blog about the I-Day. My friends S n S had mentioned that our nation is still very young and things will take time to become right. I had sort of agreed then, considering that 60 is a young age for a nation.
But some of the events since then have again made me wonder if we will ever grow up. For starters, we have 2 states - Maharashtra and Karnataka, fighting over a town (or is it a city?) Belgaum. K'taka decided to have it's assembly session there (at a small cost of only Rs. 450 crores) just to show to the people that they care. Not to be outdone, Mah responded in kind by having it's own get together (for lack of a better term) with the Dy CM of Mah the chief guest! I don't get it - why are we internally fighting over a small city when there are tonnes of more pressing issues that need to be addressed? Why waste so much of the taxpayers' money on something which could have been conducted in Blore at probably half the cost?
The other incident, has taken the reservation obsession 5 steps further. The h'able (?) education minister of k'taka has gone ahead and closed approx 2100 schools because they were not following the govt directive of "having Kannada as the medium of instruction"!!! About 1.25 lakh students are going to suffer because of this. It gets better though - schools being run by wives (yes you read it right) of IAS and IPS officers flouting the norms have not been touched! And the piece de' resistance : all these students are to be accomodated in govt run schools! The TOI carried pics of about 4 such schools - the best one had 2 floors, 11 classrooms for students of stds 1 - 7 and it was right next to a pile of garbage bigger than the school building! About the rest, the less said the better! And if this is not taking 10 steps back for every 2 steps forward, then what is?
And yes, the govt of k'taka has taken a leaf out of mah(?) govt's book and decided to go ahead and rename Bangalore as Bengaluru! As if the change will make all the city's problems disappear! (Maybe they have Harry Potter on whom they are relying to do the magic?)
The other thing, which was probably not given much importance, is the withdrawal of truce with the ULFA (For those who don't know: it is allegedly a terrorist org in the NE ). Now that region is one of the most neglected part of the country and govt really needs to be sensitive and serious about resolving the dispute. But no, they go ahead and break the truce which could lead to a loss of even more human lives. Instead our GoI decides to fight terror by joining hands with Pak and the ISI!!!
Moving to less ridiculous stuff - a colleague was mentioning how she bought some property and had to get the registration done - she had to wait for 3 hours in scorching sun and her work didn't get done. I told her why didn't you give 100 bucks to the peon/clerk and get your work done. Her reply stunned me - She had already paid 1000 rupees as bribe and yet the concerned person didn't do her work!!
If things continue at this rate, and people don't raise their voices soon and let politicians get away with murder, I don't think the future is going to be very bright! (And this is coming from a person who generally has a positive outlook towards life in general!)
-uv.
3 comments:
itna sannata kyun hai bhai ?
Hi,
I'm not sure if you know of the reason behind urging, nay, mandating these set of schools to impart education in Kannada medium.
All these schools had obtained licenses to teach kids in Kannada. Kannada medium schools are subsidised, though am not sure by how much. Laidback as governments come (or go), the faux pas was discovered only some five years after the schools continued to violate the terms of the license they had agreed to abide by. After repeated warnings produced no results, the government was forced to offer an option: derecognition, if they continued the violation.
There are a plethora of English medium schools in Bengaluru (Bangalore's neXt name :) that haven't, by any means, been affected, as they have always, and continue to impart education in the medium they have obtained licenses for.
Dive a little below the surface that channels like CNN-IBN make us look at believe, and you see that its not really pandering to some linguistic jingoism, but a legal dictum that says, 'if you need to impart in English, you are welcome, but obtain the license for it'.
Coming to the Kannada in CBSE/ICSE following in the footsteps of the Maharashtra government: This is hardly surprising - Marathi speakers in Mumbai are dwindling, and so are Kannada speakers in Bengaluru. I'm not in the know on the situation in Maharashtra - in Karnataka though, the idea is to have CBSE/ICSE introduce Kannada as a III language. I've studied Kannada in the III language, and I know the syllabus. The text book during my time was 75 pages, and started with the alphabet, and simple sentences and little stories with question and answers - all these from standard VIII. My parents migrated to Bengaluru during my VIII, and I had no problems picking up the little Kannada at that time. The alphabet sure looks different from Devanagari, but it's still read and pronounced the same.
There's no Kannada in classes XI and XII, and absolutely nil thereafter.
In fact those little sentences have helped me, the migrant, bargain with autodrivers, bus conductors, and the vegetable vendors :)
@Karan:
Yes, I am aware of the reasons behind why they asked the schools to shape up or ship out! Considering that the future of 1.25 lakh students was at stake, couldn't they have come up with a better solution? Say, allow the schools to continue in Eng medium (obtain a new licenese) but make them pay a very heft fine ? Also, the fact that schools owned by govt officials were not touched, shows that they didn't really care the law had been violated!!
About making Kannada as the 3rd language, yes that would be a good option. Even in Bombay most eng med schools teach marathi as the 3rd language. In fact it starts from Std V. Again, the main point is, govts should look at the future and act accordingly!
-UV.
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