In English Vinglish (2012), directed by Gauri Shinde, Sridevi plays Shashi, a homemaker in Pune. She runs a small business from home, making and selling laddoos. Her husband and daughter often mock her poor English.
On a trip to New York, Shashi enrolls in a four-week course in conversational English.
In 2014 candidates for the civil services exam protested against the aptitude test in its preliminary stage, known as CSAT. They called it “discriminatory to those from Hindi-speaking states as well as humanities students.” The protest concerned “the 22 marks, out of a total of 400, awarded for English comprehension,” the Business Standard wrote.
On August 4, 2014, Jitendra Singh, a minister of state, told Parliament that “the marks of the question section on ‘English language comprehension skills’ should not be included in gradation or merit.”
In 2014, six of the 284 trainees at the national academy for civil servants in Mussoorie had taken their exam in Hindi. In 2019 it was eight of 326, ThePrint reported.
In the same year, 485 of the 812 selected candidates gave Hindi as their mother tongue, according to figures the government gave Parliament.
In an interview with the journalist Rajdeep Sardesai, Kapil Dev recalled that people questioned whether his English was good enough for him to captain India. He told how he answered: Maine kaha kisi ko Oxford mein se bula lo. I said, call someone from Oxford.
Kapil Dev was captain when India won the cricket World Cup in 1983.
In Hindi Medium (2017), Irrfan Khan plays Raj, a shop owner in Chandni Chowk. He and his wife Mita want their daughter in a prestigious English-medium school in Delhi, and they want a place in elite society.
A line from the film says that in India, English is not a language but a class. Reviews quote it in slightly different words and give it to different characters.
In February 1835 Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his Minute on Indian Education. He argued that the British government in India should support education in English. Its aim was “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
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.
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.