Several months ago, in an article in the Hindu, I had wondered why there were no controversies over the obsolete English textbooks used in Indian schools even while people were often up in arms against the reactionary History textbooks.

Addressing a couple of hundred students in Sardar Patel School in Delhi the other day I returned to this theme–of how language gives us the gift of describing the world around us and of finding a place for ourselves in it. I was very much struck by the goodwill of the students, and the hard work that their teachers were putting into their task, but the most exciting part of the afternoon came when the students began to propose how they would like a course to be taught around Hindi films and several of them formulated critical questions that would form a part of this course. The students were able to foreground issues of social change, violence, narrative structure, character and representation. It would be exciting to find out what are the innovations in education, particularly in language learning and writing, at less privileged schools in Delhi and elsewhere in India.