Education: European System – Indian Practice

Subrata Ganguly who was born at Nazira (Assam) graduated in Calcutta and went for higher education (Engineering) to the University of Aachen (Germany). He added to his academic education further studies in Economics and Business Administration at the same University, finally doing a teacher’s training course in Dusseldorf. Travelling has been a passion with him. He Travelled in most of Europe. Travel roused his interest in language and scripts. The national boundaries of states might represent different languages, but he found that reading the names of streets and shops was made simple by a single script everywhere in Europe. Different phonetic sounds could be represented by the same letter in the same script. In Russia and in China he added to his experience of script, language and phonetic symbol. He realized that acquaintance with script even without acquaintance with language provided some degree of assurance in communicational attempt. In Turkey, where the language has come from Asia, but its script is Roman, he found the understanding of the gist of any communication relatively less difficult. But it was very different when he crossed the border into Iran. The Arabic-origin script, unlike the Roman in Turkey, made communication next to impossible. Travelling through India added to S. Ganguly’s experience. Though an Indian himself and able to speak some of the Indian languages, he could not red most of the scripts used. He found many people as ignorant about the script of their own spoken language as of other Indian languages. He became interested in investigating into the roots of different scripts in different countries. He noted among other things that every nation of the world except India used only a single script in the whole country. This triggered his research for a single script to serve the various Indian Languages.