Our Cheap Mindset...

Baba is a self made man. He has a degree in Law but he decided to work in real estate business sector. He gradually worked his way up and he was successful in his venture. He is a man who has travelled the world; from China to Cyprus, you name it, he has been there. He can speak two languages extremely fluently and none of them are English. Does that changes thing? Sadly, yes. It isn’t like he doesn’t understand English. He can read it, he can even hold a bit of conversation in it but he isn’t fluent in it. Like I said, he is a self made, successful man but sometimes, the world likes to remind him otherwise. You can see that this holds him back in places. He never wants to go to parent teacher meetings, he would much rather have mama go. This may seem absurd but the reality is that we as a society have tied a person’s fluency in English to how educated they are. We make memes of people who aren’t proficient English speakers and we snicker when someone uses wrong grammar. We take people who speak English perfectly more seriously. This unfair relation between being fluent in English and a person’s level of education stems from our history. We are a nation that marvels at fair skin tones and British accents but we forget that Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto are what kept us and our culture alive. In our colonial hangover, we often disregard a person if they are unable to speak English properly; their opinions, their narrative just doesn’t seem to matter. How educated a person is can only be determined by their mindset  and their actions. Yet, we allow a person’s proficiency in English to be the benchmark. This, somewhat, stems from our classism as well: English medium schools are for the elite and Urdu medium schools are for the poor. Hence, the poor will always be termed as uneducated. They will forever remain stuck in a cycle of poverty as we will refuse to employ them in professional positions. This toxic mindset where we hail English speaking skills keeps our society from processing further. A language barrier hinders the differing thought processes coexisting in our society from amalgamating and coming to a consensus. It creates a divide that further fuels hatred and bias. It needs to stop.