Thursday, January 19, 2006
12:14:03 AM
“Amar English Bangladeshi der moto hoye jachhe…”
I wonder what made him say that…such insensible, crass, thoughtless remark…but he spoke his heart though…well, I know he is great at committing a
faux pas…such a gaffe on his part to actually verbalize it in front of me…whether he can be forgiven is debatable and is greatly dependent on his solar afflictions…
I know nicer people than him who would think just the same… It’s just that they don’t realize that they (most of them) originate from Bangladesh…and just because they migrated to West Bengal years back, doesn’t take their origin away…I mean, look at all the wannabe West- Bengalites…it seems even more pointless if we look at the world map as it was before 1947.
Don’t they realize that their own nation is full of Maru, Tamil, Bihari and Punjabi way of speaking
alternative English? And they can’t even decide for one mother language… there’s a huge chunk of the people in India who detest Hindi, which is their official language…At least, we Bangladeshis are devoted to our language…we don’t have 10 other languages to choose from, ignoring the colloquial dialects…we are not so confused and utterly diverse about our language…we are so focused on Bangla, that we don’t mind sacrificing our own blood to keep it…
Generalizations are more often than not a fiction…
I don’t know one single teacher who can speak English perfectly accent-wise and/or grammar-wise in the whole college except for Dirty, who is not even entirely Indian… On the contrary, back in my small school in Dhaka, we had Mosharraf ma’am, Rafiq Sir
(“You mustn’t do that”, he always said that and everything else in a perfect British accent), Tamara Ma’am, Rabeya ma’am and Haroon ma’am who spoke perfect and distinctive English…wrote even better…one could argue that they were all English teachers…but what about Shahnaz ma’am (
my goddess-like Biology teacher, who was so full of humor, analysis and information…and all that in perfect English…many a times she corrected my wrong English…), Fahmida ma’am, Momin Sir (
our eccentric, dynamic chemistry teacher famous for his flowery language…he is even good at inventing new verbs in English, like scissored!: “These topics have been scissored off from the syllabus”, he said…), Muntasir Sir (our ‘
basically’ British brother…who taught us almost every science subject) and Sabrina Miss (our hottest science teacher with a perfect Canadian accent and the daughter of a diplomatic cipher…
always warned us from making crank calls to her number since her dad will always find out!)? Even Kalam Sir (
our Physics teacher, who boasted of having read all the translated-to-English novels by Russian authors…has a mildly obnoxious habit of scratching his itchy body parts in the class) was better than any teacher in our department over here…it’s sad that I complained his way of teaching that time…
I could go further and further on with the list…but never mind…
I can say this proudly now, Dhanmondi Tutorial always had teachers who spoke perfect English in a distinctive accent and students who had an American accent by default, considering that we all grew up watching MacGyver, The X Files, The Girl From Tomorrow, Dallas, The Wonder Years, Small Wonder, Due South and Dougie Howser, MD. Period.
I don’t know what pleasure these Indians have in debasing my small but valuable country…Just because they helped us a bundle in freeing our nation from the West Pakistanis, doesn’t mean that they have the right to remark anything intellectually illegitimate about our nation… We may have poor economy at the moment…and we might be just a small peck in the atlas…but there are Bangladeshis who are scientists and researchers in NASA and Bell Laboratories and the like…
I knew many people from my school getting admission to Oxford University straightaway…not if they spoke or wrote pathetically in English, I presume… But considering the way our NASA-ferot professor speaks in English, even that might be possible, one could argue…but it would be futile nonetheless…
