Comment by Riaz Haq on October 22, 2022 at 7:50am

#Modi offers #Hindi medical degree in #India’s war on #English language. He wants to free Indians of the “colonial mindset” left by the #British Raj. Just this week, Modi spoke of the “slavish mentality” surrounding English. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/22/modi-employs-new-tool...

Ever since it came to power, the BJP has have taken intermittent pot shots at English, branding it a ‘colonial relic’ surrounded by a ‘slavish mentality’

In October, government officials in BJP-ruled Maharashtra were banned from saying “hello” when greeting members of the public. Instead, they have to say “vande mataram” or “I bow to thee, oh motherland”. Abide with Me has been kicked out of India’s annual Republic Day celebrations and replaced with a Hindi patriotic song, while the English names of some army regiments are to be changed.

In 2020 the government said practitioners of ayurveda, the traditional system of medicine, should be allowed to perform surgery, to the horror of the medical establishment.

Now, once again, doctors are aghast after a decision by the Madhya Pradesh state government to offer a medical degree in Hindi. Until now, medicine has been taught throughout India in English.

For the past nine months, an army of 97 translators have been ransacking Hindi lexicons to find words for terms such as biopsy, neuroblastoma, and haemorrhoids.

Now that the Hindi textbooks for anatomy, physiology, and biochemistry are ready, first year students in 13 government medical colleges in Madhya Pradesh will be taught in Hindi from November, though the option of learning in English remains.

The aim of the new Hindi medical degree, said Modi, was to allow Indians from poorer families who are not fluent in English to pursue their dream of becoming doctors.

“We aim to ensure that the children of poor parents become doctors and engineers even if they are not educated in English …” Modi said on Wednesday in Gujarat while speaking about India’s New Education Policy, announced in 2020.

This push for Hindi has been enshrined in this policy which, among other things, emphasises the teaching of technical and medical courses in Indian languages. The rationale is that students can better develop their cognitive and analytical skills and be more rooted in their culture if they are taught in their mother tongue.

Some Indians, especially those who have been made to feel inferior for not speaking English fluently, would agree with Modi when he says that English should be treated as a medium of communication, not a “criterion of intellectual ability”.

The problem for orthopaedic surgeon Dr Rajan Sharma, former head of the Indian Medical Council, is the ideological motivation behind the decision. He believes politics should not be allowed to intrude into medicine.

Sharma is a Hindi speaker but, as he admits, he has no idea how to say “heart attack” in Hindi and he doubts if there are many chemists who could read a prescription in Hindi. He is proud of the contribution made by Indian doctors to healthcare globally, thanks to their training in English.

“It is regressive, backward-looking, pathetic, deplorable,” he said. “Where are the Hindi speaking teachers to teach medicine? I am not even going to talk about how good the translations are going to be because that implies one accepts the policy which I don’t. The policy will be a failure.”

Science commentator Dinesh C. Sharma, writing in The Tribune newspaper, said he hoped the course material would not be compromised by the translations.

“These graduates will be dealing with human lives. And textbooks are only one part of medical courses. There are hundreds of reference books, manuals and medical protocols, which are mostly in English and are vital for the training and functioning of a doctor,” said Sharma.

Others have suggested a better idea would be to offer bridging courses in English to help rural students to cope more easily.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 11, 2022 at 5:44pm

This year over four million Pakistani kids will turn 18. Of these, less than 25pc will graduate from the intermediate stream and about 30,000 will graduate from the O- and A-level stream. Over 3m kids, or 75pc, will not have finished 12 years of schooling. (Half of all kids in Pakistan are out of school.) These 30,000 kids from A-levels will dominate our top universities, many will study abroad and go on to become leaders. That’s less than 1pc of all 18-year-olds. These are the only Pakistanis for whom Pakistan works. But it gets worse.


by Miftah Ismail

https://www.dawn.com/news/1720082


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IN a Tedx talk I gave last year, I argued that Pakistan shouldn’t be called the Islamic Republic but rather the One Per Cent Republic. Opportunities, power and wealth here are limited to the top one per cent of the people. The rest are not provided opportunities to succeed.

Pakistan’s economy thus only relies on whatever a small elite can achieve. It remains underdeveloped as it ignores the talent of most in the country.


Suppose we had decided to select our cricket team only from players born in the second week of November. That would always have produced a weak team as it would only be selecting from 2pc of the population. Our teams wouldn’t have benefited from the talents of many of the greats we have had over the years. This is the same unfair and irrational way we choose our top people. And just as our team would have kept losing, so we as a nation keep losing.

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There are around 400,000 schools in Pakistan. Yet in some years half of our Supreme Court judges and members of the federal cabinet come from just one school: Aitchison College in Lahore. Karachi Grammar School provides an inordinate number of our top professionals and richest businessmen. If we add the three American schools, Cadet College Hasanabdal and a few expensive private schools, maybe graduating 10,000 kids in total, we can be sure that these few kids will be at the top of most fields in Pakistan in the future, just as their fathers are at the very top today.

Five decades ago, Dr Mahbub ul Haq identified 22 families who controlled two-thirds of listed manufacturing and four-fifths of banking assets in Pakistan, showing an inordinate concentration of wealth. Today too we can identify as many families who control a high proportion of national wealth.

Concentration of wealth is not unique to Pakistan: this happens globally, especially in the developing world. Trouble is that five decades after Dr Haq’s identification, it’s many of the same families who control the wealth.

A successful economy keeps giving rise to new entrepreneurs, representing newly emerging industries and technologies, becoming its richest people. But not here in Pakistan where wealth, power and opportunities are strictly limited to an unchanging elite.


Look at the top businessmen in America like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, etc, none of whom owe their position to family wealth. The richest people of the earlier eras — the Carnegies, Rockefellers — don’t still dominate commerce. Among recent former US presidents, Ronald Reagan’s father was a salesman, Bill Clinton’s father was an alcoholic and Barack Obama was raised by a single mother. Here almost every successful Pakistani owes his success to his father’s position.

In Pakistan, doctors’ children go on to become doctors, lawyers’ children become lawyers, ulema’s children become ulema, etc. Even singers have gharanas. There are business, political, army and bureaucrat families where several generations have produced seths, politicians, generals and high-ranking officers. In such a society, a driver’s son is constrained to become a driver, a jamadaar’s son is destined to become a jamadaar, and a maid’s daughter ends up becoming a maid.

Comment by Riaz Haq on November 11, 2022 at 5:45pm

The ‘One Per Cent Republic’
Miftah Ismail Published November 10, 2022


https://www.dawn.com/news/1720082

Top corporate and other professionals only come from the urban English-educated elites, especially from the two schools I mentioned above. The only influential professions where non-elites can enter —bureaucracy and the military — are also set up such that once their people enter the highest echelons, their lifestyle, like their elite peers from other fields, becomes similar to the colonial-era gora sahibs, materially removed from the lives of the brown masses composed of batmen, naib qasids and maids.

Political power too is concentrated not in parties but in personalities. Except for one religio-political party, there isn’t a party where the head is ever replaced. Politics is based on personalities down to the local level, where politicians come from families of ‘electables’, where fathers and grandfathers were previously elected.

Is it any wonder why Pakistanis don’t win Nobel Prizes? We properly educate less than 1pc of our kids. Of course, we have smart, talented people. But most of our brilliant kids never finish school and end up working as maids and dhobis and not as physicists and economists they could’ve been. Pakistan is a graveyard for the talent and aspirations of our people.

According to Unicef, 40pc of Pakistani children under the age of five are stunted (indicating persistent undernutrition); another 18pc are wasted (indicating recent severe weight loss due to undernutrition) and 28pc are underweight. This means 86pc of our kids go to sleep hungry most nights and have the highest likelihood in South Asia of dying before their fifth birthday. This is our reality.

Pakistan works superbly for members of social and golf clubs. But it doesn’t work if you’re a hungry child, landless hari, a madressah student, a daily-wager father or an ayah raising other people’s children. Pakistan doesn’t work well for most of our middle-class families. This is why disaffection prevails and centrifugal forces find traction.

The real predictor of success is a person’s father’s status. Intelligence, ability and work ethic are not relevant. Of course, some manage to become part of the elite: but those are the exceptions that prove the rule.

Pakistan’s elite compact allows wealth and power to perpetuate over generations and keeps everyone else out. This is what’s keeping Pakistanis poor and why it’s necessary to unravel the elite compact. We need a new social contract to unite and progress as a nation.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 11, 2023 at 10:18am

A Pakistani Ivy League University in the Making?
By Akhtar Mahmud Faruqui

https://www.pakistanlink.org/Opinion/2023/June23/09/01.HTM


Beaconhouse National University is Pakistan’s first not-for-profit Liberal Arts University, founded in 2003 to provide tertiary education in the arts, design, architecture, media, humanities and social sciences, business and information technology. It was established through significant donations from a number of benefactors including the Kasuri family, the Dawood family, Dr Parvez Hassan, Mr Izzat Majeed and the Government of Punjab, to name a few.

BNU’s mission is to foster empowered and impactful global citizens in a diverse, socially sensitive, cross-disciplinary, liberal arts environment. BNU retains its identity as an apolitical, equal-opportunity, truly national higher-education institution, fast-emerging as a world-class Liberal Arts university.

Below is a piece highlighting the establishment of the university and written earlier during its formative phase.)

ABC’s Nightline program years back was a pack of distortions about a country that remained steadfast in its support for the US. Entitled ‘The most dangerous country in the world,’ the program conveniently ignored the country’s march in different fields and the progressive outlook of Pakistan society.

Yet, there was one positive comment that seemed to have unwittingly slipped from Ted Koppel’s lashing tongue: Some of the world’s best schools are in Pakistan! As the compliment was paid the ABC camera panned across a classroom full of young boys and girls. Their uniforms looked familiar. Was it a Beaconhouse School chapter? I was not sure. Yet the compliment - ‘some of the world’s best schools are in Pakistan’ - reechoed in my ears, and justifiably so. My own son, Jahanzeb, had studied at the PECHS Chapter of Beaconhouse. He was later to win a full university scholarship and excel in studies on migration to the US. His entrepreneurial successes were applauded by Forbes Magazine years later.

Over the years, the Beaconhouse School System has seen marked growth. Its branches dot the country’s landscape, and their number precipitously multiplies. Founded by Mrs Nasreen Kasuri and Mian Khurshid Mahmood Kasuri, the System is the largest private network of schools with well over 40,000 students This wholesome trend testifies to the fact that private schools today play a complementary, nay, catalytic role in strengthening the education sector in Pakistan. They have a chain-reaction effect and, in this enterprise, Beaconhouse’s example stands out, thanks to the painstaking strivings of Mrs Kasuri who has been at the helm of the School System since its inception.


----------

Dr Isa Daudpota, an IT expert who belongs to a distinguished family of educationists of Sindh and is an outstanding academic in his own right, speaks candidly about the BNU. “The effort is to impart quality education over and above what is offered by other universities. The closest to us is LUMS but we offer a more diverse menu. We offer subjects which are not taught in different universities.

“The way to teach would be different. There will be more open discussions. Indeed, it would be discussion-based education, giving a student the chance to design his/ her course. BNU will be closer to an American Arts University.” ....

---
If PINSTECH (Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology) could win accolades and be described as ‘best of both the worlds’ by TIME magazine, thanks to the vision of the late Dr I.H. Usmani, Chairman, PAEC, would it be too much to expect that the BNU would emerge as the equivalent of an Ivy institution - if not today, 10-20 years hence? If some of the best schools of the world are in Pakistan, why shouldn’t we succeed in establishing some of the world’s best universities in the country? – afaruqui42@yahoo.com

Comment by Riaz Haq 1 hour ago

Sadanand Dhume
@dhume
In India, critics of the 19th century statesman Thomas Macaulay portray him as some kind of cartoon villain out to destroy India. In reality, he was a brilliant man who wished Indians well. [My take] v
@WSJopinion

https://x.com/dhume/status/1996428594680381501?s=20

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/western-education-has-lifted-india-3888...

India’s prime minister is mad at an Englishman who died more than 150 years ago. In recent weeks, Narendra Modi has taken aim at Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59), a scholar and statesman best known in India for introducing the country to Western education.

“Macaulay broke our self-confidence,” Mr. Modi said in a speech in New Delhi last month. “He instilled an inferiority complex within us.” A week later, while hoisting a flag at a prominent new Hindu temple in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya, Mr. Modi reupped his charge that “Macaulay laid the foundation of mental slavery in India.”

Mr. Modi’s criticism of Macaulay may make for useful political theater, but the prime minister is dead wrong. Far from hurting India, Macaulay helped it enormously. If not for access to Western education, India today would probably look less like an aspiring global power and more like an outsize backwater. And if not for the English language, which links educated Indians from vastly different backgrounds, tensions between the politically dominant Hindi-speaking states that account for about 45% of the country’s population and the rest of the country would be harder to manage.

The current debate can be traced to 1835, when the dominant power in India was the London-headquartered East India Co. That year, Macaulay won an argument among company officials about the best language in which to educate Indians. He wanted the British to support education in English and cease funding schools that taught in Sanskrit and Arabic.

In India, the case against Macaulay is built on a combination of misinformation and selective outrage. A widely circulated WhatsApp message claims erroneously that Macaulay gave a speech before the British Parliament in which he vowed to “break the very backbone” of India by replacing its “ancient education system.” Macaulay made no such speech, according to the Hansard archives, which hold historical parliamentary records. He wasn’t even in Britain at the time it was allegedly made.

Some of the animus directed at Macaulay is based on things he really said. Macaulay laid out the case for English education as a civilizing mission, which some Indians understandably find offensive. “We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect,” he said. He also said that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”

Some Indians use these statements to caricature Macaulay as a cartoon villain. The reality is more complex. Macaulay was a self-made man elevated to the pinnacle of Britain’s ruling class, thanks to his precocious intelligence and scholarly brilliance. Before he was 8, he had completed an outline of world history and a poem in the style of Sir Walter Scott. He reportedly knew seven languages, including ancient Latin and Greek.

A man of his time, Macaulay didn’t question the cultural and intellectual preeminence of Britain. But this didn’t make him unsympathetic to Indians. On the contrary, he thought it was England’s duty to quicken Indian progress. In his biography of Macaulay, Bombay-born author Zareer Masani notes that Macaulay compared India with Russia, still something of a feudal backwater at the time, but one that, in Macaulay’s view, was catching up with advanced Western European nations.

Comment by Riaz Haq 1 hour ago

Sadanand Dhume
@dhume
In India, critics of the 19th century statesman Thomas Macaulay portray him as some kind of cartoon villain out to destroy India. In reality, he was a brilliant man who wished Indians well. [My take] v
@WSJopinion

https://x.com/dhume/status/1996428594680381501?s=20

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/western-education-has-lifted-india-3888...

Macaulay hoped that India would foster an educated class that could match the best in the world. He believed that Indians exposed to Western education could gradually improve native languages by infusing them with modern concepts, including scientific terminology. While this may sound condescending today, at the time it was a broad-minded position. For a 19th-century racist, it would have been impossible to imagine an Indian who was “English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.” Unblinded by prejudice, Macaulay saw potential in Indians at a time when this was relatively rare.

If not for Macaulay, India today might be very different. Those who point to Japan or China as examples of countries that have modernized without widely adopting English misunderstand India. Compared with India, Japan and China are much more linguistically homogeneous. India houses more than a dozen major languages. If you’re a Punjabi speaker who wants to open a bank account in Kannada-speaking Karnataka, your best bet is to do it in English.

Over time, Hindi, the predominant north Indian language, has become more widely understood across the country. But making it the sole national language would set up perpetual conflict with non-Hindi speakers, who resent the idea of being dominated by the economically laggard Hindi belt. In a pan-Indian context, English is an equalizer, not an oppressor.

Fortunately for India, English isn’t going anywhere. More than 1 in 10 Indians speak it to some extent. In the higher reaches of professional, commercial and intellectual life, fluency is common. The ghost of Macaulay may face criticism in modern India, but his legacy is in no danger of disappearing.

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