MUMBAI: Jagdish Prasad Sharma has hardly dreamed that his proficiency in Hindi would one day take him from the quiet holy town of Mathura to the bright lights of the US.
Earlier this month, Sharma was one among the 100-odd Hindi teachers who travelled to Noida to be interviewed by a delegation from Connecticut and Carolina, which was in India to headhunt young, full-time Hindi teachers for schools in the US.
Hindi is the new Mandarin. Just as Mandarin is being learned by youngsters all over the world to give them a strategic advantage with the emerging China, Hindi too is being sought after as the language of the other Asian tiger.
Some schools in the US have decided to introduce Hindi as a foreign language with staples like French, Spanish and German.
Apart from Hindi teachers, the delegation also interviewed about 70 Arabic teachers. Last year, the Bush administration had identified Arabic and Hindi among half a dozen critical foreign languages which it felt were vital for its national security.
"We're going to teach our kids how to speak important languages. We will welcome teachers here to help teach our kids how to speak languages," US president George Bush had said during a National Security Language Initiative in New York.
With an initial budget of $114 million, this initiative aims at helping more Americans to become multilingual and to do so at a young age. Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, Persian and Hindi are all "important languages".
Instructors are being recruited to teach these from kindergarten right up to the university level. In India, the recruitment process is being facilitated by an arm of the HRD ministry, called Education Consultants India Limited, or EdCIL.
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