On 04-Jul-11 8:08 PM, Deepa Mohan wrote: > There are two things that really bother me about this video (and in > general) and that is a) the fact that very often, such people are only > preaching to the converted...and b) that to be heard (especially on the > net) one needs to be proficient in English.
Deepa, It is better to address a problem piece by piece rather than wait for a perfect solution, wouldn't you agree? I am not sure what you mean by "preaching to the converted" in this context. The audience you're presumably talking about - "urban English-is-practically-my-mother-tongue" - is, in my experience, *very* cynical about babudom and politicians, and therefore, not "converted". Unless I am misunderstanding you. > I am sure we have honest >"babus" and others, who are not good at English...how will their voices > be heard, especially by the urban English-is-practically-my- > mother-tongue (I include myself in this) category? I am not sure whose problem this is, in your worldview. > And how do we solve the gigantic problem of the category of "babu" who > truly makes it a four-letter word, as Srivatsa Krishna says? One approach is the Singapore way of doing things, where one has both carrot and stick; the carrot being that bureaucrats are paid on par with the private sector (paid more than comparative jobs in the private sector, sometimes). As an aside, I've briefly run into Srivatsa back in 1999 in a work context, when he used to work for Chandrababu Naidu and was trying to persuade the startup I worked with to set up base in Hyderabad. An articulate and smart guy, I thought. > How many people do we have on this list who are from the IAS? A few. I'll let them speak for themselves, if they want. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
