On the day a very fine user of the English language grabs the keys to the Oval Office while millions egg him on, Alfred S.J. in Washington D.C., forwards an email received by a colleague received from an Indian engineering student attempting to use a product developed by their company.
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hello…
am an engineering student pursing my Btech Telecommunication and doing my final semester project in **NET, in an ieee paper… my topic s ” Modeling and Simulation of Fading and Pathloss in **NET for Range Communications”… and here i have the task of creating an rayleigh fading channel in **PNET..cud u plz help me out with this?? …waiting for ur reply to progress with my project..and wud be grateful if u help..
thank u
<name_deleted>
***
Also read: Bangalore’s idiots who speak an idiolect at home
churumuri 
Why that company doesn’t introduce a formal course on ‘informal English!’
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Corrupt language, spoken and written, should be embarrassing but it seems to be an accepted disease in India — quite like the other sorts of corruption.
Indians can be rather inelegant communicators, spoken and written. We don’t care to complete sentences, our vocabulary is rather limited, we seldom understate… and using elegant turns of phrase? Who ever cares!
Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru was our last national leader who inspired us to write; Atal Behari Vajpayee came close.
I wonder if the lingual abuse may be attributed to our simultaneously learning/using so many different languages.
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Some comments on a forum about our ‘outsourced IT labour’ this time the dreaded ‘offshorers’:
”
This would explain the quality of the “IT Talent” that I have seen coming from India. I spend more time cleaning up after these fools than I do anything else. Note that in the US it seems to be a little different. I suspect that in the US we get the cream of the crop. Here in Saudi, though, and the rest of the Gulf, its a whole different story.
[Edit] Note that I DO have a couple good guys, the vast majority of the ones I have on staff, though, are terrible and don’t last very long. I would say a turnover of 4-8 months for about 80% of the resources we get. One in four or five end up either not getting fired or are offered a renewal on their contract.
”
…
”
I don’t think the US get the cream of the crop. The US is Mecca for these people, and they’re all on a pilgrimage to get there. Since the US discovered this and stopped the practice, they then switched to using other US-friendly countries as a stepping stone on their way to the US. Hence the turnover. They don’t really want to be there any more than you want them.
And you’re spot on with the analysis, in my country its the same – one or two are worthwhile and the rest are smelly buffoons you need to clean up after professionally and personally, with all the loyalty of a third-world nation army general.
”
…
etc.
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awesome. Btech students are doing modeling and simulation projects!! cool only it is. most students world over end up doing some implementation type of project. its awesome that some kid is working the complicated fields and waves math. i remember when we studied it, we barely managed keeps our noses above the waters, the subject assumes some serious training in math and gets complicated from chapter 1.
only thing i am wondering is, if his question is pointed enough or is it way too generic for the subject. a generic question is unlikely to get a reply. i cant judge. mebbe gurus in fields and waves can help.
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TS,
though it sounds good, I feel that the students are forced to take up on something big without the initial steps in the earlier semesters. For example I don’t know how much of stochastic processes this guy has studied, before doing this kind of communications project. I have seen this in lot of EE related forums where the student is basically asking for the solution to the entire project :) But even then I’m glad that they are atleast undertaking such projects, but I’m not sure how much help they get from their faculty. The problem is with the VTU syllabus where the emphasis is on new stuff while the basics are ignored because they are “old”
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First of all, hat’s off to TS for seeing some intrinsic value in the email:) Amazing isn’t it! while the technical levels have advanced, language skills have become extinct! My own niece would write inarticulate sentences in her email and she thought it was ‘kool’ till I told her it was distinctly uncool.
Peshva saab,
Nehru probably inspired the ‘Iskool’ way of ‘is’speaking as well. For some one who was schooled at Harrow, Nehru’s spoken English was atrocious.
On a quiet morning in the cold light of truth, his writing doesn’t inspire either. But then I am an eclectic reader:)
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Please take a break language purists. Grammar only takes us so far. Sentence formation keeps changing on a day to day basis. It takes a while to update an 1800 AD grammar book.
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What is it that the Churumuri has qualms about ? Is it against the grammar or is it about the way he is asking ?
About his question I find these points to be lacking :
a. he is asking some one a question without giving details his like what is the problem he faced when he tried do the task.
b. Did he tried a Google search or anything like that to check if this problem has been faced earlier by some one else and if already there is some information on the net about it.
I have other qualms also about his question but without much idea about the context I will leave my points at that.
At the outset when reading his question it seems that he wants some one to provide detailed steps to do his task, like a kid asking for his homework to be done for him. This is bad and such behavior is not specific to Indian students alone. One often comes across such questions in online forums (and newsgroups) and most often they get flamed . One a related note check this URL http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html which provides hints about how to ask questions in a better manner in online forums so that the questions get good responses.
However it seems Churumuri posted this mail to just show how engineering students are bad at English. But Sirs, please note that lack of English competency doesn’t imply a lack of technical competence. For all his bad English the student might be good at math, and at other engineering subjects. Sure a good communication skill is must for an engineer to clearly communicate his ideas and be successful at work. But sadly the legacy of British rule still gives today an uppity feeling to many that bad English implies that the person is a bad Engineer too. I have interacted with engineers from European countries and China whose English was bad but who were the masters of discipline.
So I repeat again communication is important and a good engineer must know how to present his ideas in a succinct manner to make his point.
And this mode of communication need not be English, it can be a drawing, UML diagram , code he writes etc. But just because that his mode of communication is English which he is bad at doesn’t mean that he is a bad engineer.
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Sateesh:
True, I have personally worked with people whose knowledge of English was terrible, but were really dedicated, sincere, hard-working and had immense technical competence.
And I have also worked with people who were extremely good at English, but were experts at shirking work. There are people who fit all the conventional definitions of “smartness”, but are absolutely hopeless when they are assigned a task.
Recruiters and biased in favour of candidates who speak good English. Many people judge a candidate by the fluency of speech as opposed to technical skills!
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Just found this headline in CNN-IBN…. This is the quality of our “educated journalists”…
“Cop who died Kasab not in Ashok Chakra list”
Cop who “died” Kasab ??????
The link is
“http://ibnlive.in.com/news/cop-who-died-kasab-not-in-ashok-chakra-list/83593-3.html“
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