Make Yourself Eligible, Don’t Make Demands

confined ghetto mentality. But if, instead, they start thinking in realistic terms, they will experience a profound sense of freedom. No longer, they will realize, would they want to blame others for their woes. While in the first case, they are led to view all roads as blocked, in the latter case they will find vast vistas opening up all around them. Take, for instance, the case of the Urdu language. Muslims complain that the Urdu language is being discriminated against in India. But if you study the matter deeply, you will realize that the problem of Urdu is actually because of the limitations of this language, rather than as a result of it being discriminated against. In other words, it is an internal, rather than external, problem. The actual problem lies in the fact that the Urdu language has failed to establish its importance in the contemporary world. That is why even the most passionate advocates of Urdu think it necessary to send their own children to English-medium schools! Before 1959, the Russian language was given hardly any importance in America. But when in that year Russia sent a rocket into space, travelling at the speed of 7000 miles per hour and reaching the moon in a little more than 30 hours, all of a sudden the Russian language acquired great importance in intellectual circles in the West. This rocket signified that Russia had surpassed America in space technology. It led American experts to believe that their knowledge of space technology was incomplete until they had read all the available literature on the subject in Russian. This engendered a sea-change in attitudes towards the Russian language in America. America began to arrange to obtain Russian scientific journals and to translate them into English. All important scientific treatises in Russian were rendered into English. This sudden importance that the Russian language acquired in America was not a result of any group staging demonstrations or making demands.