Quote:
Originally Posted by JeffB
Its because when India was ruled by the British it included India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as one larger colony.
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Also Ceylon and Burma. (that's Sri Lanka and Myanmar for those modern boys out there)
Indeed, while not to make any excuses for the Raj, the English essentially laid the foundations for modern India. Their current system of democracy is modeled after the British, and many of the brightest leaders were educated in Britain or in British schools in India. The Raj also built the railways and much of the industry that has played a role in India's success. In addition the Raj was really the first time for a while India had an effective central government, which is probably one of the reasons why most of India remained in one piece post-colonization.
Sorry for the off topic rant.
Back on topic, English is a widely spoken language among "educated" people in India.
It also benefits from many primarily English speaking countries around the world, and from a usage similar to India (as a national lingua franca) in many others such as South Africa and many other former colonies.
As noted elsewhere it has the benefit of being the international language of shipping and aviation.
As per Mandarin, it is a language much tougher than even English to learn, and while it has impressive numbers of speakers, most are concentrated in China (and even there it is often a second language). The Chinese business community generally recognizes that they deal mostly with English speaking countries or countries where English is a frequently taught foreign language and learn English themselves rather than try and get others to learn Mandarin.
English also benefits from being one of the five languages of international diplomacy, along with russian, french, spanish and mandarin. It is also one of the working languages of the EU institutions.
Lastly, it is the language into which almost anything is translated, and for which there is a Learn Language X course in. (Although French does well in the second category).
In other words, learning Mandarin gets you access to Mandarin books, but learning English gives you access to a great pool of English works as well as translations from many other languages.
Correction to the above post:
Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was apparently not part of the Raj. For some reason I thought it had been at some point. Apologies.
