Indian lack of Japanese language skills comes in the way ? Businessworld

We are proud of our Anglophonicity and our connection with the US. But there is a whole world out there which does not speak English. English is not the only language of scientists and enginners. It is possible to learn from any technologically advanced country, and people can do so by learning its language. China sends thousands of young people to American universities; but it does not confine itself to the

Anglophone world. The Chinese also learn Japanese to access knowledge from Japan. Similarly, the Poles and Russians learn German to access German knowledge. Japan and Germany have not missed out on Indian brains; they just do science and technology in their own language, and use the brains of nationalities that are prepared to learn their language.

Not that Japanese companies avoid English altogether. (via Businessworld - A Perception Of India).

How India missed out ...

This article lays out how India missed out on Japanese investments, technology and business - due to our well-cultivated tunnel vision about English language (amongst many other things). Indian loyalty to English language exceeds the loyalty of the British themselves to their language - and we refuse to see how this affects us.

India urgently needs to put more languages in lingual basket - instead of putting all our eggs in the English language basket.

What we cannot ... however, allow ourselves to become is an outpost of the Japanese business system - which is what this article pushes India to desire.

Doing less business with India however, is as much a Japanese loss as much as Indian!!