????Cash Cows for Hindi teachers?????

[Satyanad Kichenassamy]

R. Barz' message does sound a little rash.

I can quote quite a few places where you cannot have an intelligent 
conversation in any other language than Tamil, except perhaps with
a few people such as employees of the central govt. 

Perhaps on a more positive note, one may wonder whether the appropriate
response to the current state of Indian/Indic studies is really to try to
artificially inflate one of the branches of Indology, such as Hindi
studies, thereby promoting division, and perhaps bickering (I hope not),
among the Indology community. 

A multi-disciplinary approach, such as suggested by several on this
thread, appears more reasonable.

                                              S. Kichenassamy

On Wed, 13 Nov 1996, Richard Barz wrote:

[...]
> >
> >I wonder whether the Hindi motivation in the western democracies isn't,
> >ultimately, largely ideological too.
> >
> >Robert Zydenbos
> 
> 
> It's fashionable in some circles, for ideological and other reasons, to
> indulge in Hindi-bashing.  But, sorry, it just isn't true that "the
> >percentage of the Indian population with whom one can have an intelligent
> >conversation in Hindi is very limited indeed".  In fact, if one ignores
> >the artificial divisions between Hindi, filmi Hindi, Hindustani and Urdu
> >and just calls it all Hindi, then Hindi is the only South Asian language
> >in which one can have any kind of conversation, intelligent or not, any
> >where in India, Pakistan or Nepal.  In fact, since English really is the
[...]
> 
> Richard Barz
> Richard.Barz at anu.edu.au
> 
> 
> 
>