My niece, Priya, was in town recently. She has been teaching English as a second language in cosmopolitan Vancouver, where every summer Chinese youth flock to learn English. Many are children of the newly rich who have prospered in post-reform China, but it is extraordinary how difficult they find learning English. Of the dozens of nationalities she has taught only the Japanese find it more difficult. The reason is that the languages of East Asia are tonal. The same word in Mandarin can have many meanings depending on the tone; hence, the Chinese have difficulty coping with English grammar and pronunciation, and Japanese children, I am told, have been trying to learn English from kindergarten since 1870, and they still cannot speak it.

'Schadenfreude' is not a nice German word — it means to take pleasure in the misery of others — and like envy, it is a base human emotion. But I must confess it is exactly what I felt as I listened to Priya. Linguistic experts confirm that Indians find it easier to learn English than the Chinese because our languages are part of the Indo-European family and share the same grammar. Since our success in the global capitalist economy lies in part in our ease with English I felt reassured that our competitive advantage would not easily disappear.

The Chinese government understands better than ours that the potential demand from global outsourcing of business processes through call centres is so large that it could literally wipe out the old disease of ''educated unemployment'' in the Third World. Hence, it has adopted a national policy to make every student literate in English by 2008. Other nations have also figured this out and teaching English as a second language is a huge industry across the globe. But in India our education policy towards English remains paralysed.

Fortunately, every Indian mother seems to understand what our politicians and intellectuals don't. She knows that the way to lift her family from poverty into the middle class is to teach her child English. Even in the poorest home, she will save from her meagre family budget to pay for English lessons or remove her child from a government school and put her in a cheap private school where they teach some sort of English.

If our success in the global economy depends on our natural and historical advantage with English, and if our ability to conquer educated unemployment also depends on it, shouldn't we aggressively push teaching English as a second language right from class I? You would have thought in a democracy that an enterprising politician would have discovered votes in such a promise. When I put this to the education minister in one of our states, he asked, where will the teachers come from? I repeated what Priya had told me — to know English is to be able to master 400 words. Thanks to interactive English teaching either on the Internet or through CD Roms, you can learn to speak them in three months.When you make a mistake, your world-class teacher corrects you. Good call centres are employing these very tools.

So, here is our chance not only to win the global capitalist game Indian style, but also to bring more equality of opportunity. A child in a Gorakhpur slum with Internet access can now learn from the best English teachers in the world, and suddenly the field begins to look more level between her and a child in Mumbai's elite Cathedral School. All we need is someone in some education ministry in some state to wake up.