Financial Times

Of communication, 'kaduwa' and dangers of alienation
By Random Access Memory (RAM)
My late father worked for the Ceylon Government Railway for 36 years before he finally retired in the seventies. The good storyteller he was, here is a real life story of office happenings, he once told. During the days of the British Raj, Manis worked as the personal peon for the Superintendent of Railways, an Englishman.

On this fateful day, Manis was told by a colleague that a messenger was sent to inform him, that his wife has taken ill. Manis was asked to come home immediately. As was the requirement of the day, he wrote a sick note in the Queen's language and faithfully presented it to his boss. The note read thus: 'Sir, when I come, my wife well. Man now says, she not well. I want day's leave. If she well, I will come. If not, how to come?" The Englishman grinned and gave Manis the day off.

The reason RAM used the story his father told, is to illustrate that effective communication is indeed possible without the use of 'proper' English. It certainly is good to have a command of English or for that matter any other useful language e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Hindi, French or German.

The point though is that, without it, effective communication is not impossible. In most instances, the process of alienation that takes place at places of work mostly in the private sector, of those, that do not communicate in 'proper' English, is the result of our own insensitiveness to this reality. University graduates, who make it through government sponsored programmes such as the 'Sarasavi Saviya' to the private sector, are known to face situations of humiliation, for they are considered not to have an adequate knowledge of 'proper' English.

At the university, students have for long, used the terms 'Kaduwa' to describe English, meaning a two edged sword, and 'Kapenawa' or getting slashed, meaning the inability to use the language to advantage.

The two edges of the sword symbolically represent access to upward social mobility in having this shiny armoury, and the possibility of being cut off from the main stream socio-economic activity as a result of an inadequate command of the language.

In the seventies, at the University of Keleniya, courses were set up through an English Sub-department to enable students who were weak in their English communication skills to better equip them with these skills. This was the result of the efforts of the late politician cum university don, Doric De Souza, who was also the head of the newly set up English Sub-department at the time.

The teachers recruited were from the 'Colombian' (Colombo) elite, most of whom held the attitude that these unfortunate rural students badly needed their help.

These students were subject to more than eight hours of intensive English a week. Running parallel to this exercise were French lessons of just three hours a week taught by a free spirited Frenchman, who did not carry any baggage of demonstrating sympathetic predilections towards his students.

The marvel of the outcome of these two courses was that, at the end of three years of teaching, the very students who sat at both English and French classes were communicating in French with relative ease and still struggling with English, or with the art of the use of the 'Kaduwa'. After more than 30 years, attitudes have not changed that much. But the ground reality has.

Those who have access to the shiny side of the armoury have reigned while marginalising those that get slashed by the other edge of the sword. Like what the free spirited Frenchman was able to achieve, a new level of confidence is now with those that stood on the sidelines in the past. A change of attitude and mindsets is now a dire need, absorbing the ground realities on the action front. For that makes good business sense.

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