The Times of India – Shounak Ghosal
“There was a time when one would take up French or Russian simply for the love of a new language — for reasons like “I wanted to read Tolstoy’s original version”; but career ambition has overtaken cultural zeal. Today, it’s more common to find an engineer learning Spanish, or an MBA Mandarin, to beat competition in the Kolkata job market… or even a banker being recruited on the basis of her foreign language skills. The third, or fourth, language is turning out to be more important than the first, or second — English — when it comes to landing a job. From German to French and from Spanish to Chinese, hundreds, even thousands, of students are flocking to be trained to get that edge. There are scores of qualified job aspirants for a post, but only a few with the extra advantage. “At Max Mueller Bhavan Kolkata (MMB), there were 800 students last year,” says Madhurima Moitra, head of the language department at MMB. “Three years ago, it was 450. A lot of engineers get scholarships to Germany for postgraduate programmes. We have campus recruitments just like engineering colleges,” she adds. “There is a great demand for people with a good knowledge of German,” adds German consul-general Rainer Schmiedchen.”(more)