James Hadley Chase will bring more jobs than voting

Oxford, here in the university town of Chidambaram — about 200 kilometres south of Chennai, is a tiny room filled with red plastic chairs. A white board stands at one end of the room, with the words ‘‘our motto is bringing English and success together’’ handwritten across it. There is only one English teacher in Oxford. He is a former Air Force personnel, holding a Master’s degree in public administration.

Over here, the boys join others like them, people from small towns and villages with big dreams. A house surgeon who wants to do his TOEFL and IELTS. A nurse who has heard she can find a job easily in the US and UK. A phone mechanic who wants to keep up with the trends in telecom. A teacher from Annamalai University — which is in Chidambaram — seeking respect. In four months and at a cost of Rs 1,100 they hope to finish a ‘‘complete and comprehensive course’’ in English. And then take on the world.

‘‘The students who come to my classes are from Mayiladuthurai, Kattumannar Koil and Bhuvangiri, the nearby towns and villages. Most are farmers’ children who want to land good jobs in MNCs and call centres,’’ says S. Arumugam, who started the Oxford Institute of English, and is its only teacher, though he has two assistants.

He says his students are those who have realised that the world is changing. ‘‘They understand terms like globalisation. That they cannot survive without knowing English. Chidambaram is full of engineers and doctors but they can’t prove themselves beyond a point because they do not know English,’’ he says.

When Arumugam first started his school of spoken English in 2001, only three people joined. All of them engineers, who wanted to go abroad. When the next batch also attracted only the same number of students, Arumugam worried if he had made the biggest mistake of his life.

‘‘But then,’’ he says, ‘‘things started picking up.’’ A look at the number of slippers outside the door of Oxford can tell you that. Now there are four batches, 30 students in a group. The course is so in demand, with the morning and evening batches bursting at the seams, that Arumugam plans to raise the fee to Rs 1,500. And he knows the people here won’t mind paying up.

‘‘I want to be able to communicate with my students,’’ says M. Thillai, a student here and an instructor in the engineering department of Annamalai University, while Hariharan R, a stenotypist at the university just wants to understand the language.

Together with the rest of the class they read James Hadley Chase hoping it will help them learn grammar. They also read newspaper headlines and letters to the editor, says Arumugam, for comprehension.

Masilamani V, 44, a phone mechanic with BSNL, who can’t keep up with the trends in telecom technology because it is all written in English, hopes all the reading and writing will help him update his knowledge.

‘‘I have been reading a lot about call centres in the newspapers and want to join one and then go to Singapore,’’ stutters 27-year-old A. Vijayakumar, the son of a farmer. His English is halting and he has been told that to get a job in a call centre, he needs to work on developing a British or American accent. He is ready and willing. ‘‘But what exactly is an accent,’’ he asks.