My Quest for French Literacy

There was a time, during the level 2 of my French studies that I was convinced that I would never be able to read French. After about 3 or 4 sentences, my mind would just go on a vacation to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. I was persuaded to quit my pursuit of French proficiency. Then the money-minded element of my head told me that quitting would be equivalent to a waste of money! Now that was good motivation to continue. But it still did not solve my problem of having a slight headache while reading French; I just couldn’t read.

I then told myself that it would be advisable to concentrate on the Listening skills for a while. Since I reckoned that babies learn to talk due to prolonged auditory exposure to language, I subjected myself to a blitzkrieg of French songs and movies. It would also cause an annoyance. I plainly could not comprehend the sounds that the French people produced from their throats and mouths! Now I had to discipline myself. There was no way I was going to give up. So I started watching the French movies and cartoons along with the French sub-titles, hoping that I would understand the dialogues that way. So I discontinued French reading for a while. 2 weeks later, I read an article (not in French) in the Times of India. It changed my approach towards improving my reading skills.

This article was titled Power of subtitles and was written by Gurcharan Das. It spoke about the efforts of Dr. Brij Kothari and his work with DoorDarshan. This project is about subtitling of songs on DD shows like Rangoli, Chayageet and Chitrahaar. The viewer subconsciously associates the spoken word with the words displayed on screen, thus practicing reading in an unobtrusive and hassle-free manner. It involves no extra cost or time investment for the viewer. This method effectively increases literacy levels even with just 30 minutes of exposure to such programs every week. Thanks to Dr. Kothari’s mission, a Nielsen-ORG survey, conducted in 2002 and 2007 to measure the influence of subtitling, showed that only 25% school children could read a simple paragraph in Hindi after five years of education. However, this soared to 56% if they also watched subtitled songs for 30 minutes a week on Rangoli. Similarly remarkable outcomes were reported among adults.

This convinced me that I was on the right track and my methodology was perfectly sound. From that day onwards, I watched 2 French movies or animated films, along with the French subtitles weekly. That amounted to nearly 5 to 6 hours of French audio and visual exposure per week. I did that for 4 months. My efforts paid of in January 2008; I managed to read the French novel, L’Africain of J.M.G. Le Clezio in 10 days! I had become perfectly literate in French. J’ai devenu francophone! I wrote about this to Dr. Brij Kothari on his website http://www.planetread.org/home.php. He wrote back saying that my experience mirrored his own while he was learning Spanish. That was seriously cool. According to AC Nielsen’s ORG-Center for Social Research, there are nearly 312 million early-literates and 444 million non-literates in India. This estimated number of non-literates is significantly higher than the official figure of 296.2 million. I wish all channels start sub-titling their shows. Everyone stands to win. Channels get better TRPs. Higher literacy levels means better levels of income that translates into higher sales for advertisers. That is fantastic motivation to speed up India’s conquest of 100% literacy and the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals.

It’s Raining Men, Hallelujah!

My friend: Tell me Natalia, have you ever seriously loved a guy?

Me: Yup. Next?

My friend: Just one guy?

Me: Hmm, nope, wait let me count them.

My friend: You're joking! Are you nuts?

Me: Nope, I seem to have a weird fortune with guys. Every time I like one I find out that he already likes or is dating someone else! Crazy isn’t it? But anyway, they were more like big crushes!

My friend: (Giggles) so tell me, how do you cope up in a situation like this? Can you just move on?

Me: Absolutely! Why should I create trouble for myself and the guy? It can get complicated. And besides, there is no harm if one guy doesn’t like you. India is full of men. Our predecessors have ensured that. They never wanted a situation where girls would have trouble finding dates!

My friend: Explain, explain! What do you mean by that?

Me: Well you see the sex ratio of India is 927 females per 1000 males. That means a surplus of 73 boys! So if I don’t get one guy, I know I still have 73 waiting in the line for me! Yipee!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My friend: Natalia you seriously are weird! And what if you don’t find a match even amongst them?

Natalia: No, problems! I shall simply register myself on http://www.bharatmatrimony.com/ or http://www.shaadi.com/ . «Invited groom for tall, FAIR, educated girl, slim, whatever will be my age/ 5’4”, working from educated family, teetotaller, non-smoker, non-vegetarian. Caste no bar. » The moment people read the word 'fair', I shall be flooded with offers! No problems at all. I assure you, someone or the other will like me that way. But I pray to God that I don’t ever feel the need to register myself on those matrimonial sites! I am not an uninteresting character at all!

My friend: Hey of course you are not! We are just imagining some hypothetical situations. (Gleefully) It’s bad for the boys! I pity them. They don’t have as much as choice as we girls do.

Me: Oh no! Not at all! They can always go to Russia, Japan, and many other East European countries! All those places have more women than men! In fact the last time I read about it, there were 884 males per 1000 females in Russia and 1040 females per 1000 males in Japan! So boys need not worry at all. However, their families would! I wonder how most Indian families would react to their sons bringing home a European bahu (daughter-in-law)! The guy gets past caste, language and nationality barriers in one clean sweep! Globalisation at its best.

Letter to Arjun Singh

Dear Mr. Arjun Singh,

Ever since the Five-year plans came to be used as a guideline to channelize our nation development endeavors, every plan has been treated as just another tome, left to gather dust, with no comprehensive efforts to ensure that the recommendations of the Plan be implemented. Instead what you politicians do is to play along with centuries old problems by aggravating them and not solving them to ensure that you can hold on to your vote banks and have sufficient irrelevant topics for your election campaign speeches. I don’t know what it takes to get you people to realize that proper development efforts in the right sector will help you garner more votes than anything else as the effects of such efforts have a far more widespread impact than anything else. As in your position as the Human Resource Development Minister, you seem to be highly devoted and overtly enthusiastic about projecting yourself as the messiah for the upliftment of the underdeveloped masses of our country. Since you have chosen education as the tool for social upliftment, let me remind you of the education-related monitorable targets of the current five-year plan (2002-03 to 2006-07):

Ø All children in school by 2003; all children to complete 5 years of schooling by 2007

Ø Reduction in gender gaps in literacy and wage rates by at least 50 per cent by 2007

Ø Increase in literacy rate to 75 per cent within the Tenth Plan period

We all know that India is nowhere close to achieving these targets by the end of year 2007. In the face of your recent proposal to introduce 27 per cent reservation for the other backward classes for so called social development, I ask you the following questions:

Ø How about spending the Rs. 8000 crore for accelerating the efforts of the government (if any) in the achievement of these targets?

Ø Is it an unwritten rule that every Five Year Plan has to be a failure?

Ø Are Planning Commission and its formulated five-year development plans only a farce?

Let me tell you that India’s development targets in the tenth five-year plan are far more ambitious than the Millennium Development Programme of the UN Development Programme. It is high time that we (government and the people of India) take our Plans seriously and work towards making them a grand success so as to ensure the enhancement of the standard of living of the Indian people. The Human Development Index rank of India is 126 on the Human Development Report, 2007. 177 nations were surveyed in all. Shouldn't we be aiming for a more respectable position, as even nations like Saint Lucia, Namibia, Vietnam, Cape Verde, Guyana and even the Occupied Palestinian Territories have better ranks? As a proud citizen of India, who had the privilege of having great scholars like Dr. Abdul Kalam and Dr. ManMohan Singh as President and Prime Minister of my nation respectively, I hope that you will resort to real knowledge based development programmes at the grass root levels to ensure social justice and development and understand the fallacies of the hike in reservation which won’t lead to any major social gain.

Yours truly,

N. Hule

(A CITIZEN WHO BELONGS TO AN OBC CASTE BUT REFUSES TO USE THE RESERVATION FACILITY AS I HAVE A DOCTOR FOR A FATHER AND A LAWYER FOR MOTHER. I WOULD NEVER LIKE MYSELF TO BE CALLED BACKWARD IN ANY MANNER.)