Gone are those days when colonial powers used to subjugate domain of impotent nations so as to colonize them in 18th century.

This practice was known as colonialism, which has an affluent chronicle of the ruling, dominating and exploiting people in terms of their freedom, culture and religious beliefs.

Contrary to this, in the current 21st post-colonialism century, almost all the nations have the freedom to live their lives within their particular frontiers and no ruler could even endeavor to invade anyone’s realm.

However, colonialism does not only mean to seize territories physically. As a matter of fact, many philosophers reckon it as a modus operandi of ruling the minds of people and making them fragile mentally, spiritually, consciously and culturally.

Considering one of the most important fractions i.e. culture, it is pertinent to point out the soaring mania of using English as a medium of instruction at schools, colleges, universities and professional sphere here in lieu of our national language Urdu.

Being a teacher of one of the known systems here, I myself have witnessed copious middle schoolers, who, being bad in Urdu, score least marks in this subject.  

In fact, many of them claim to be afraid of this particular subject. Being a nation, one wonders where do we stand when it comes to teaching our kids about the importance of Urdu language.

Not to mention that parents emphasize their kids to refine their English as this is the only way to impress people here. No matter how dumb you are, just speaking in English with fluency would get you the best job in celebrated companies and institutions.

You visit any educational institution, you will find innumerable youngsters who articulate and write well in English but when it comes to communicating in their own language, they feel embarassed.

In fact, many of them do not even know how to write in Urdu and instead of feeling ashamed, they are living in their own epitome and feel proud that they are modern and educated. They are actually pretending to be English in front of Urdu speakers.

Nevertheless, we are not adopting only English language, it has also impacted our own beings particularly in terms of dressing. People are getting westernized, leaving behind their pure faiths, beliefs, and traditions.

The crux of the matter is that we are still being colonized in terms of language, which is an integral part of the culture.  Youngsters consider our national language as marginal and this concept needs to be overhauled.

Colonialism ended in the 1960s, however, Shakespeare’s mother tongue still dominates here, from educational institutions to professional milieu.

Presently, a controversy persists in the parliament of Netherlands for over admiring the significance of English while disregarding the status of their native language i.e. Dutch. In fact, approx 90 percent of the Dutch population now tends to converse in English, which poses a threat to the Dutch that is vanishing little by little.

Considering the current situation, when students no longer opt for doing masters in Dutch, the natives are of the view that they are going through languicide, the process of killing the language.

The dilemma perseveres here too as very few students choose the Urdu language as their major. History is the evidence that those nations, who have the power of money, language, culture, land and every luxury of life, have been surviving and evolving profitably than those who were being ruled upon i.e. colonialized.

Being humans of this fast pacing world, we should always embrace the diversities, nevertheless, overlooking our own national language, which is our identity, is not appropriate and is indeed startling.

Conclusively, we must preserve our national language. We should avoid overestimating the use of English language in educational institutions and instead of adoring English, we should incorporate different languages such as French, Arabic and Chinese etc in the curriculum. Only then we will be able to preserve our identity while halting colonial powers from ruling upon us as they did in Sub-Continent back in 18th century! (Aiman Inam)