Damn the english language

Pakistan is a country of above 150 million people and of which more than 40 percent can read or write in Urdu. Around 90 percent of these literate people can only communicate in Urdu or in their mother tongue. English, not only being foreign to them but also serves as a continuous pain in their daily life. You get a machine and it will carry a weird leaflet for use that has nothing to do with any language you actually know. Buy a medicine from market and see, a vast majority of the nation can not read the expiry date written on it but Health Department will never forget to publish an advertisement in their favorite daily news paper, instructing to check the ‘expiry dates’. The list can easily go to hundreds of pages but that will server nothing, we already know this.

Everyone in this world decides things on the basis of its outcomes and after weighing those outcomes to be in favor he or she goes for it. Does English really go in favor for us? The least, I would say is today’s news in which it was mentioned that Muhammad Asif (a Pakistani cricket player) took banned Norandrosterone because he couldn’t read the provided instruction booklet which was only available in a language alien to him. Not only monetary losses but these types of losses (loosing self-esteem) are abundant in our national life. Finland, with a mere population of 5 million has everything in their own language while our national cricketers can not have a leaflet in a language they know.

I am sure Mr Javed Ashraf Qazi will continue getting money from US to feed our English language teachers at schools but it will never help him getting 150 million people ‘English’ educated. And it will result in the loss of millions of those brains also who would got used during the process. An engineer with crammed formulae and an IT specialist who can only repair software will find themselves unable to enrich the country in real terms. Don’t take it cynic, just look around and you will find the evidences.