language prison?

You’ve probably read this on X
"If you don't know Marathi, do not come to Maharashtra."

That viral video from Mumbai locals in August 2025 broke the internet.

Within hours, the woman's declaration had sparked fierce debates across every WhatsApp group, LinkedIn timeline, and dinner table conversation in urban India.

Home Minister Amit Shah doubled down: "Those who speak English will soon feel ashamed."

BJP MP Nishikant Dubey refused to speak English in Parliament, calling it a "foreign language" that would make Indians "slaves again."

Tamil Nadu's ₹21.5 billion funding was frozen for refusing the three-language formula.

The list goes on. 

But I don’t think we're having a language war.  We're having an innovation crisis.

For context: last month, I was at a tech conference in Bengaluru where a startup founder was pitching in flawless English to a room of investors.

His idea? A fintech app for rural farmers.

During the Q&A, someone asked: "Have you actually spoken to farmers in their local language?"

The founder paused. "Well, we have translators..."

That's when it hit me.

Here was someone trying to solve problems for people whose language he couldn't speak, using a language that wasn't native to him either.

And that’s when I got curious.

IIT Guwahati analyzed 25,988 code-switching sentences from 71 Indian speakers and discovered something disturbing.

Constant language switching creates measurable cognitive strain, depleting working memory resources needed for complex problem-solving.

A 2024 study of bilingual students found that cognitive control abilities significantly predicted different aspects of foreign language anxiety.

Translation: These students operate at just over half their cognitive capacity when forced to think in English.

But here's where it gets interesting.

The "foreign language effect" documented across 47 experiments shows that while English processing can reduce emotional bias in decision-making, it fundamentally alters how we process information. 

Simply put: When you're thinking in English, your second or third language, your brain is working at 70% capacity.

Yet India's entire innovation ecosystem operates on the assumption that English-mediated thinking is superior.

Think about this for a second.

We're forcing our brightest minds to innovate with one cognitive hand tied behind their backs.

I pulled up NITI Aayog's Innovation Index and noticed something. 

Perfect correlation between English proficiency and innovation rankings.

Karnataka (42.5), Maharashtra (38.03), Tamil Nadu (37.91), all high English proficiency states dominate while Hindi-belt states like Bihar (14.48) and Chhattisgarh (15.77) languish at the bottom.

Tamil Nadu files significant patents annually while Bihar, with a comparable population, barely registers.

Maharashtra hosts 2,587 startups, Karnataka 1,973, while the entire Hindi belt struggles to compete.

But then came the exceptions. And it changed everything.

The billionaire who doesn't speak English in boardrooms

Patanjali's Baba Ramdev built a ₹10,000 crore empire operating primarily in Hindi.

He took on giants like Unilever and won market share they couldn't even imagine.

Amul's Verghese Kurien transformed India from milk-deficit to world's largest producer by bridging English technical knowledge with Gujarati farmer communities.

The ₹53,000 crore empire he built happened despite the language barrier.

The pattern became clear: English proficiency has become India's innovation gatekeeper, not because it improves performance, but because we've built systems that require it.

While we debate which language our kids should think in, China filed 1.64 million patents in 2023 with the vast majority in Chinese.

Their tech giants: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, serve 1.4 billion people without requiring English fluency from their innovation teams.

China's royalty receipts from technology grew from $160 million in 2005 to $12 billion in 2021.

Advanced economies now pay China $7.9 billion annually to license Chinese innovations developed in Mandarin.

Japan offers another model.
With patent intensity of 3,974 per $100 billion GDP, they innovate primarily in Japanese.

The Toyota Production System?
Developed entirely in Japanese.

Kaizen philosophy?
Concepts that don't translate directly to English revolutionized global manufacturing.

The world's most innovative countries conduct core R&D in native languages, then strategically use English for international collaboration.

India has inverted this model completely.

Here's what really opened my eyes.

India's vernacular internet users are growing at 18% annually compared to just 3% for English users.

536 million vernacular users expected versus only 199 million English users by 2025.

ShareChat and Moj, operating in 15+ Indian languages, reached 325 million monthly users and achieved profitability with 15% EBITDA margins.

Something many English-first platforms struggle to accomplish.

When Amazon India added language support, Hindi usage alone grew 3x in five months.

The company discovered that 90% of vernacular users come from tier-2 cities and below, markets that English-only approaches simply cannot reach.

Yet most startups remain trapped in the "English bubble."

Customer acquisition costs for English-only platforms run 3-5x higher than vernacular alternatives.

We're building for the 10% who speak English while ignoring the 90% who represent the real opportunity.

That Mumbai train incident wasn't really about language pride.

It was about economic anxiety.

The fear that language requirements exclude people from opportunity.

But the English obsession is doing exactly that, just systematically.

78 years after independence, our premier institutions, IITs, IIMs, AIIMS, remain exclusively English-medium.

Thomas Babington Macaulay's 1835 mission was creating "a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect."

We've completed his project so thoroughly that we now self-impose linguistic barriers he could only dream of.

Pre-colonial India innovated extensively in vernacular languages.

Sanskrit texts documented advanced mathematics, sophisticated surgery, metallurgy that produced rust-resistant iron 1,600 years ago.

This entire ecosystem was replaced with English-medium education designed not to promote innovation but to produce colonial administrators.

We never recovered.

The solution isn't choosing between English and vernacular languages.

Research shows habitual code-switchers who use different languages for different cognitive tasks demonstrate 28.5% improvement in divergent thinking when allowed to use both languages strategically.

Here's my new approach:

The results have been remarkable.

Ideas flow faster, solutions feel more intuitive, and market feedback is dramatically richer.

Companies like Google and Microsoft India already do this, conducting customer research in multiple Indian languages, finding insights invisible to English-only approaches.

The choice that will define India's next decade

Think of it. Politicians themselves choose their native language and have translators when meeting other leaders.

Vernacular platforms are growing 6x faster than English-only alternatives.

They're capturing markets worth hundreds of thousands of crores that English-focused competitors cannot reach.

India stands at a linguistic crossroads.

We can continue forcing 90% of our population to innovate in a foreign language while the privileged 10% operate at diminished cognitive capacity.

Or we can reclaim our multilingual heritage as a competitive advantage.

The English trap is real, measurable, and costly.

The question now is whether India has the courage to break free.

Until next week,
Ritesh

P.S. - In what language do you think most creatively?
Hit reply and tell me. I read every email.

PPS: I have nothing against people speaking English…just against its imposition (basis the data)