"Why are you mixing English with your native tongue?"

I was asked the aforementioned question while I was talking in Bengali (!) with my parents. I put down my phone, smiled and turned towards my friend and said to him: "Oh! Everyone in my country does it.We mix a couple of English words here and there with our language". With a quizzical expression, he said: "That's weird. Why don't you speak in fluent Bengali? Isn't that your mother tongue?" His questions stopped me on my track, because the answer shocked and shamed me. I realized that the reason we don't speak in straight Bengali is because we don't know how to. That we are too much used to speaking in English with everyone back in our country. That we focused so much on English that we forgot our own mother tongue.

I didn't want to tell my friend that there are people, students of my age, who preferred English over Bengali, preferred to write essays in English than in Bengali. Heck! I know people who can't even count from 1 to 100 in Bengali! Shame.

So. Where did we go wrong? The English medium curriculum does not give enough focus on the Bengali language, and the little focus it gives is completely flawed. I think the Bengali medium students are more adept in speaking and writing in Bengali because they learn all the school courses in Bengali. To compensate for this, English medium schools should just completely overhaul its meager, flawed system of teaching Bengali. Instead of telling students to memorize 'kobita' and 'vabshomprosharon', they should make students read tons of Bengali book, just like they make the student read and analyse Shakespeare and Oliver Twist. Moreover, students should be forced to write tons of Bengali essays week in, week out- so that they develop a good hand of writing in Bengali.

This article is just my night time musing. I am pretty sure that with a bit of more thought we can come up with better and more efficient solutions. Bengali is our identity. If we lose it, we lose who we are.