Read the signs, make policy that includes people

When my friend was in school in Delhi, his family put him in Russian class rather than Hindi because they thought that it would give him an advantage in a world where the erstwhile USSR was a superpower.

- NISHA SUSAN

Estimates show India has around 18 million deaf or hard-of-hearing people.

(ISTOCKPHOTO)

He was happy to not do Hindi but sad that he was not in French where the cool kids were. When he was 14, he took the family car for a secret joyride and in a moment of bravado, gave a drunk, middle-aged Russian man a lift. He successfully figured which hotel to pour the man out at-the only time the Russian ever came handy.

Around the same time, I was a high school student in Oman and my classmate was taking private Arabic lessons because her family, which had come up the hard way at home in Assam, thought their impressive daughter had a future in the UN. Back in the 18th century, a nine-year-old Raja Ram Mohan Roy too was sent from Bengal to Patna to study Arabic and Persian. In more recent times, there has been plenty of overlap in the populations of people being urged to spurn all Chinese products as well as the people taking Mandarin tuitions. Not surprising since China looms large and neon.

Up north in Canada, folks joke that when you quietly put your five-year-old in French immersion school, it is because you want to give her everything she needs to become prime minister someday. The particular game of teen patti that parents play with global realpolitik is ... global. And just about as reliable. Which brings us to the question of a strange public interest litigation (PIL) filed recently in the Supreme Court by a Mumbai-based activist asking to make American Sign Language (ASL) compulsory in education for the deaf in India

In late August, the