Modern Colonization Problems

The first time I started to pick up English was when I was in the 3rd grade.

I listened to an inspiring lecture about how important it is to speak in English by one of my school teachers.

And that year, she managed to get my whole class got inspired and we started speaking in our broken English.

Post that a series of events continued in my life.

The first TV series I watched was MasterChef. I watched in Starworld, an English entertainment channel.

All the sports I watched, the commentary was in English.

The facebook and whatsapps, my chats were in English.

The language became the norm and cool.

But here’s where it starts to get tricky in my life right now.

In my workplace, and like most other Pan India workplaces, English is not just the official language but it’s also considered as the inclusive language.

Because Hindi, though the most spoken language in India is still not inclusive because the south of India doesn’t speak it along with a few other parts of the country. So we’ve decided that English is the inclusive one.

Paradoxical.

How we, including me, have aligned that a foreign language should be considered as the inclusive language.

I just got a book called Fire Bird written by Perumal Murugan, a Tamil author. But it had to be translated into English and only then I could read the book.

I’ve gotten to a point where in my life I’m more comfortable with the English language than my mother tongue.

So happy realization.

It’s me. I’m the colonized product.

I am the colonized product because of the environment I grew up in, the environment I am living in.

It’s almost 80 years since the Independence, and there’s still a need for us to be validated by the West.

Rama and his troops built a bridge from South of India to Lanka. But it’s only when NASA put out the information from their satellite, I believed it.

Yoga is good for me and you. But when the Americans started doing it, it was more believable, more cool to the people of the origin country.

I’ll use pronouns in my bio. But I never once cared for the Transgender community in India. Where we failed as a society to treat them with basic dignity and respect. But hey, now since the West cares about LGBTQ community, let us also follow it.

It’s not just the language.

But we care for what they care for.

What Instagram tells us to care for.

Let it be language, politics, social issues, pop culture, and everything else.

Hence I’m a little tired of it.

It’s time the West started listening to us and the world outside of their country.

Times are changing or times have already changed.

I’ll stand for what I stand for despite what the West thinks.

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