Last Saturday was when I began my first set of teaching lessons to students from local language schools ('vernacular' is a cringe-inducing word, I try and avoid it as much as I can). Thus finally ended my month long initiation into the Teach India program. You can call TOI's Teach India campaign a body shopping campaign looking for volunteers to invest their free time teaching under-privileged kids under the aegis of some non-profit NGO working with such kids. After presentations and talks by multiple NGOs, I chose Kotak Education Foundation working in the slums of Bhandup close to where I stay. Two weekends were then spent with the KEF volunteers understanding the background of the kids, what they expect and how to go about it. Finally we started our coaching sessions with the kids last Saturday. I would be responsible in coaching them on English conversational skills. Some points that I noted from day 1:
1) We were specifically instructed to try and weave in Cricket and Movies into every conversation with the kids. Invaluable advice when dealing with them. MS Dhoni is a huge hit with the kids.
2) I realized how huge Shahid Kapoor is. My volunteer partner, Sanyo & I together have been entrusted with 11 kids. 7/11 kids named Shahid Kapur as their favorite actor. Just goes on to show that the Khans and Akshay and Hrithik have grown too old for an upcoming movie generation's tastes, and in all likelihood, will be phased out with the younger lot of actors replacing them. Shahid with his chocolate boy looks and great dancing skills holds maximum potential. If only, he knew how to act.
3) The kids are very undernourished. All kids that we handle are 14 yrs old, but they could easily pass off as 10-11 yr olds in posh India or even younger in the western world.
4) The boys and girls are really shy to interact with each other. When they were asked to sit with each other, the girls sat on one side and the boys on another. When we try to mix up the girls and boys there was much resentment and for the first hour the group exercises yielded no results because the mixed teams refused to interact with each other.
5) Don't get into written English. Spoken English in itself is a tall task, getting into written English would mean much, much more efforts.
6) This exercise also made me realize the price that India has to pay for globalization. A more globalized India means a more 'English' India. A more English India means that most of rural or poorer India would need to learn a foreign language. If not that, then they would be excluded from the benefits that come from globalization. We really need to figure out a more inclusive approach for growth.
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11 comments:
There are very few people who prefer to spend their weekends for a noble cause such as teaching the poor & unprivileged, glad to see you amongst them. Its true that teaching these kids isn't an easy task, it will take time considering their basic grooming in academics; but nothing is impossiblealso...
It's great you're doing these kinds of things - I've always wanted to do all these but I never knew how and no one ever tried to recruit us at college. Sigh. good work, Joey.
Btw, not sure what you mean about the "price" of globalization. One pays a price if one loses something to gain something. It isn't like these kids were living very good lives before globalization came and deprived them of it or something.
Chivalrous, Thanks for your kind words.
Shree, I started doing this because I had lots of spare time in hands on weekends. There is no net at home (that is on purpose), no easy access to good and interesting movies other than the new ones releasing in theaters, TV time that needs to be shared with parents, not much going out because of the rains, and also the gradual disinterest with religion means that a major portion of Sunday-church-going time also gets freed up. The reason to take this up was more because I wanted to keep myself occupied, and less out of any altruistic objective.
Your second point is true to some extent. My only concern is that we are alienating a huge section of the society as we are progressing. Our knowledge of English is one of the main reasons we are hitching onto the "Progress through Globalization" bandwagon, and at least for now, English is limited to a few urban centres. If the rural-urban divide, rich-poor divide increases because of this, then it could lead to some kind of strife. I am not able to put it in words properly, but I am sure you get the drift.
I do understand what you're getting at -- and I think what you're trying to get at is the basic unfairness of it all: that to be successful in India, one has to learn English. Which I agree with, in the abstract - I feel that way myself many times.
But a few comments.
First of all, it applies to us as much as to the slum-kids. Did you ever think that knowing English better than you know Malayalam (say) was a "price" you had to pay (and for what)? I suspect that's not the way you think about it, yes?
Second, there *is* a price to pay for globalization, in my opinion, and that is the loss of local culture. But by culture I mean something very specific: things like novels and stories and poems, works of art. There is always a danger that if everyone learns in English who is there to read the novels in Marathi, or write them? plays? movies? There is something specific being lost here -- but again, note that this is very specifically an "elite" worry, slum dwellers have had no access to it anyway.
You say that English is limited to a few urban centers. This is true - but again, the standard of comparison should be to what it was in the past, not to some golden future where we want it to be. In the past, i.e. before the IT revolution in India took off, it was indeed graduates of a few engineering colleges in India who were able to get jobs (because there were few jobs). These colleges, for most part, were in the metropolises. This is not the case now - even graduates of colleges in the interior of India are now doing quite well, when it comes to jobs. So I don't really think we're alienating people, we're instead expanding access to jobs to more and more urban centers, as opposed to just metropolises.
Is there a rich-poor divide in India? Yes, there are a few really really rich people in India - there always have been. But when we look at the "new" rich people in India today -- the ones who have good jobs in IT -- their standard of living is what the middle-class in the West *routinely* took for granted (still do). I would argue that the problem in India isn't the gap between the rich and the poor (like it is, say, in the US) but the fact that we just have too many poor people and not enough middle-class people In other words, it's poverty, not income inequality that's the problem.
The question worrying you is - will this (the so-called divide between the rising middle class and the poor) lead to any kind of strife? On the whole, I think not. Strife happens when poor people *resent* middle-class people. Right now, the poor want to be a *part* of the middle class (which is a good thing). So yes - strife is a possibility but not in the near future, I think.
The key question is - what should we do if we don't want this strife from ever happening? The answer is that we need to make sure that knowing English isn't the only way of getting a job in India. This is clearly not possible when most jobs are IT jobs. But what about manufacturing jobs? Here knowledge of English is not necessary at all. Also these are high-volume jobs; a call-center can employ at most a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people - a factory can employ thousands! How do we get more manufacturing jobs in India? By, as you put it, hitching onto the bandwagon of globalization! So either way - there's no avoiding globalization for India, the only issue is to use it to our benefit.
I sense a lot of Arundhati Roy in your worry, Joe :) But Roy's worry, it seems to me, has always been about something else, even if she never puts it quite that way. It has to do less with the fact that globalization has offered a way up for certain people (like us, say) and more with how these certain people (the rising new middle class of India) seem to express no concern whatsoever for those who are less fortunate than them. I have issues with this on lots of levels, but the key point is that this has very little to do with globalization. And again, with some specific changes, this is just a new form of old questions: why do men kill each other? Why do they oppress each other? Why are there wars? Why can't we all just learn to live together? Etc, etc.
These are not uninteresting questions but they are *religious* questions - and as such, technocrat that I am, I find them relatively uninteresting while discussing policy. But you can see that they're what really animate that horrendous essay of hers that we all read and commented on recently. Her frustrations are less with globalization than what seems to be human nature.
But anyway, I've drifted far away from where I began, so I'll stop now. And sorry for the length :-) I can't seem to stop myself these days :-)
I guess what was bothering me when I mentioned about the "price" to pay, was as well put by you, the unfairness of it all.
Like you mentioned, I also often think that the loss of local culture is a price to pay. It hasn't bothered me as much (as say when I look at the "unfairness" part of it), because culture is something which was never static in the first place. All cultures are constantly evolving. Age old texts in Swahili and Sanskrit are no longer widely read nor are there any new ones being written. Similarly maybe some 40-50 yrs down the line, the multiplicity of local languages in India might reduce. But I doubt whether the next generation would worry about that. Today they do seem like valuable causes to be fighting for, who knows, tomorrow's generation might not even know about its existence to bother about them.
Again my worry stems not from the fact that this is happening, but from the thought as to where this will lead to. Every country has the rich and the poor. But if you see the list of top 100 richest people in the world, you will find a sizeable number of Indians in that list, and the country where the maximum number of people live below poverty line (people as described by the UN as living on less than $4-$5 a day, I do not know the exact amount) it's India that tops the list. So that's where my worry comes from. While it's true that a sizeable number of Indians have moved to the middle class layer in the past 10-20 yrs, if you look at the statistics, poverty in India has still kept pace with the rising population. I don't remember the exact statistics or where I read this, but the poor are still about 50% of India's population today as compared to 20-30-40 yrs ago. This means that the poor have kept remaining poor, while the rich or those who had access to resources (one of them being resources to learn and communicate in English) are continuing to grow richer. I am just concerned that this indifference from the growing middle and upper class towards involving the poorer society in economic growth might lead to a strife later.
And frankly, I haven't ever had the patience to read any of Arundhati Roy's pieces completely. So definitely this is not coming from her. Maybe this thought is influenced by my reading 'Mother' nowadays, where the worker class goes up in revolt against the blood-sucking industrialist regime. And we all know this for sure, that we need the worker class and the farmers in India. Not all of India can be working in the services sector.
Like you pointed out, there should be more manufacturing, farming, and infrastructure work happening in the country. I do not know whether globalization in itself is the key for this. For these industries, it is the local demand which they mostly cater to. Globalization would help definitely, but it should be supplemented with local market demands as well. We cannot be dependent on, say GM to set up its manufacturing plant in India, but rather expect to see more of Tata Nano manufacturing plants in India. For these industries to grow in India, at least the local workers do not need a strong knowledge of English. Similarly for the farmers to be better equipped, it is not knowledge of English that matters more. And that is where I think, our growth model needs to focus more. While without question, the current growth model has impacted the lifestyle of the upper class and the middle class quite positively, we need to think of a more inclusive growth model which would help the remainder of the country.
Good work man
Good Work Man
Are you planning to continue with the teach india program even after the completion of its tenure?
yes, actually we are done with Std IX classroom trainings now which is what we were supposed to do as part of the TeachIndia program. Starting next month, we will begin with Std VIII classroom trainings, in our own capacity and not as part of the TeachIndia program. I am planning to continue as a volunteer for that as well.
Pretty cool planning! I always wished to teach the poor/orphan kids as I perceive that to be the best way to keep oneself indulged in a worthwhile activity. We often spend time & money lavishly for satisfying our own desires but we ignore such activities.
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