Mis-placed pride?

This post is inspired by this comment on my last post by a friend of mine.

Growing up in India, it was a very common sight to see parents forcing their children to talk in English. This is a very wide spread phenomenon in most "good" schools and middle class/upper middle class families.Don't get me wrong.- In today's cosmopolitan World, I think it is very important to have good spoken and written English skills.In fact, I think that's why we Indians have an edge over the rest of Asia, when it comes to competing in today's global market.Be it for jobs or trade or even higher education - it is important to articulate in English.

Having said that, is it really necessary to force the idea that your (Indian) mother tongue is inferior to English? Is this a residue of the Colonial days?The sad reality is that, India is the only country where the native language is considered "inferior".People have many arguments- one common argument is that India has far too many languages to have a common medium. Why is that we are open to accepting English ,which is a foreign language as a common medium, but have short comings about accepting Hindi? There were so many political movements in the late 60s and early 70s in TamilNadu which were against teaching Hindi in school. Where are our loyalties? Why are they are so misplaced?

There are so many of my friends, who cannot read or write in their mother tongue. They learnt French or Sanskrit in school. How can you grow up in your own mother country and not learn even your mother tongue? We take so much pains to adapt to the countries we immigrate to or even move to for a couple of years. We rotate our "r" and speak with a drawl.We take pains to pronounce "rendezvous" and "Paris" correctly. In fact, it is very fashionable to say " oo I dont know Tamil/Hindi/etc- You know, I learnt only French and English in School".In all the government run schools in Tamil Nadu, the students are taught ONLY in Tamil.This is a severe shortcoming , when they write competitive exams or interviews. Wheres in Pondicherry, its neighboring state, the students are taught ONLY French!! How much more confusing can it get? We need to strike a healthy balance.

If this goes on, I think our languages will completely be lost. I hope people's attitude changes.

The British practised divide and rule and made us sing "God save the Queen". As we celebrate our 6oth Independence day, isn't it time for real independence from the "English babus"? Isn't it time to stop teaching our children "London bridge is falling down" and "Baba black sheep"?Maybe not stop teaching these rhymes, but instead teach them "Amma inge vava" too ?

Edited to add:-

I did not want to point out my school initially- but decided that I would rather pour it all out here is what I said in a comment to this post.

I am actually terribly angry with our own school- about how we were mis-guided and made to believe that English is superior to our mother tongue.Though I attribute my conversational English to the foundation laid in my school in those formative years, I also attribute my poor knowledge of Tamizh literature to them.I wish they had given us a bit of both and not made us feel that knowing Shakespeare and singing English Carols was Superior to understanding Purananooru and singing Thamizh thaai vazhthu.