While growing up, we have witnessed how important it became to be good at English. Not everybody in our class was good at English. Even most of us were not good at it at one time. We had teachers who spoke English very fluently and we wished to be like them. English was a struggle; it gave the feeling of elite, educated, civilized, and a smart person.

And thence came our obsession with this language. We have often seen parents until a few years back who would, while talking to their kids, use English words in a very absurd way and a funny accent. And yet they seemed cool somehow. Only a few people didn’t associate it with being cool. Sometimes we even came across people who would speak English with a desperate accent only to pretend that they are non-Hindi somehow, which was of course not true.

Even in adults today, many of us can read, understand, and write English well, but are not able to speak it fluently and with confidence. While having our office meetings, when even a member of a family talks in English on phone, it raises the ears of the rest of the family members. We have even had a lot of funny memes on the same. There have been mentions in movies and jokes where an English kid is looked upon with awe while speaking English with ease, making us think that look at this kid, even he is better than us!

Although this entire obsession with English is a part of the colonization of our minds, we are not going into that discussion here. English remains a kind of language widely used in professional and social cultures. It is common to see people who can’t watch English movies without subtitles despite being good at the language.

There was a time when teachers would ask the students to either stay quiet or talk in English. If they are caught talking in any other language, they’ll be punished. The entire class used to go silent in such moments. These incidents are funny to recall now. Maybe it still happens in schools. Of course, insecurity and obsession over the English language have been forced into justification.

However, parents of the present generation do not have to worry about this. Sooner or later their kids will end up learning English. Maybe not today, but by tomorrow every kid will become fluent in English. Do you know how? This is because they’ll hear so much of English around them that they’ll end up grasping it. Be it teachers, or their friends, or books, movies, web-series, cartoons, and songs — everything has been digitalized and globalized to such an extent that children will come across this language so often that they’ll end up learning it effortlessly. Till a few years back, we only had books and newspapers as a source of reading materials in English. The reach of English movies, cartoons, and songs was not very wide.

Therefore, it is rather advisable that you focus on teaching your kids Hindi and your local language. Because these are the languages that kids will lose a grasp on over the years. Something we have taken for granted for our whole lives will become difficult in the coming future. It is still easier to learn English than it is to learn Hindi as a language. Imagine the day when kids will not even remember how to write ‘jh’ in Hindi. It is going to happen in a few years. In fact, it has already started to happen. 

Many careers and professions require the knowledge of Hindi or any other language, including the local ones. In fact, the more languages a person knows, the broader their knowledge and expression gets. This is because every language has untranslatable words. And only when you have a word for a thing, it becomes understandable for you.