On September 11, 1893, Swami Vivekananda rose at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago and opened with “Sisters and brothers of America.” The audience is reported to have given him a standing ovation of two minutes.
The record is less certain than the legend. A Chorus of Faith, an early book on the Parliament, does not mention the phrase, and the reaction may have grown in the retelling. Indian leaders still recall the speech on its anniversary.
Near midnight on August 14, 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi. “Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge,” he said. “At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.”
Admission to the Indian Institutes of Management does not end with the entrance exam, CAT. Candidates who pass it face a group discussion and a personal interview.
For its 2023 to 2025 program, IIM Shillong gave the interview 40 percent of the final score and the CAT score 30 percent. The group discussion was a qualifying step, and its score did not count toward the final result.
In May 2021, the Telangana politician K. T. Rama Rao joked on Twitter about the hard names of Covid medicines. Shashi Tharoor replied: “Not guilty! How can you indulge in such floccinaucinihilipilification, @KTRTRS?”
The 29-letter word means the habit of judging something to be worthless. Social media users went to their dictionaries, and many joked about how to pronounce it.
Amitabh Bachchan has said that as a young man he tried to get a job at All India Radio and did not succeed. “Maybe my voice was not suitable for what they were looking for,” he said. His deep voice later became one of the best known in Indian film.
The radio host Ameen Sayani recalled that he was too busy to see the young Bachchan, who gave up after a few attempts. “I would have been on the streets and he would have got so much work on radio,” Sayani said.
In the Rigveda, speech is a goddess, Vak. Hymn 10.125 is spoken by Vak herself, and she is named as its seer.
Personified, Vak is most often identified with Bharati or Sarasvati, the goddess of speech.
“Behno aur bhaiyon, aap ki khidmat me Ameen Sayani ka adaab.” Sisters and brothers, Ameen Sayani offers his greetings and his service. With these words Sayani opened Binaca Geetmala, the Hindi film song countdown that began on Radio Ceylon in 1952.
He reversed the usual order, “brothers and sisters.” At its peak, the show had about 400 radio clubs, and thousands of listeners wrote to Sayani every day.
Critics called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Maun Mohan, Mohan the silent. By the end of his time in office he was mocked as a “silent prime minister.”
In a video message before the state elections in Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, he answered: “I am satisfied that I was called ‘Maun Mohan’.” The country, he said, now remembered his work.
In 2014 the assessment company Aspiring Minds published a National Employability Report on engineers. It was based on more than 120,000 engineering students from more than 520 colleges. For business analyst jobs, 73.63 percent lacked the English communication skills the work required.
English was the strongest predictor of whether a graduate found a job. The report rests on the company’s own test.
The newspaper Mint reported on SpeakX, a startup that teaches spoken English to Hindi speakers for Rs 300 a month. Its users grew from about 10,000 to about 108,000, many of them in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
Many of the learners can read and write English but cannot speak it. That holds them back from well-paid jobs.