Since I was six, I have considered myself a literate person. After all, doesn’t literacy mean being able to read and write? In fact, back home I am considered not only literate, but one of the best educated—for, as my people put it, having gone to university “not on a guided tour” but for serious studies.

But my visits to Europe have left me wondering whether am literate or illiterate. First it was in Berlin, a few years ago, where I spent over an hour in a supermarket looking for such mundane commodities as sugar and salt. Everything was branded in German, and every German I asked which was what s/he had a ready answer for me, “I don’t speak English”. I wondered silently whether the “I don’t speak English” was a German phrase. Finally I bought my goods, partly through intuition and with the help of a young lady who knew some more English than “I don’t speak English”. Never mind that I ended with white shoe polish instead of toothpaste in my bag!

The case is not peculiar to Germany, as I have witnessed the same in Denmark and Netherlands although on a lesser scale. You can hardly read the menu in the hotel, or even the free newspaper you pick in the street. You end up ogling at pictures trying to decipher what’s in the news.

I feel utterly illiterate every time I do this. I have pleaded with people in buses to read the headlines for me. What’s more stupid than asking; “Eh, I have a newspaper here, could you tell me what the headline says?”

I remembered all these when Sulakshana, a classmate pleaded with us to contribute a Euro each to support Amsterdam Weekly, the only English newspaper in Amsterdam, which is on its death bed. Now 40 Euros, we are a class of 40, cannot save Amsterdam weekly, but the gesture is quite telling; that those in the Netherlands who cannot speak Dutch need Amsterdam Weekly, and more.

I believe it is the high time that the EU came up with a common language for Europe. English, I think can do the trick, as it is spoken by many people in Europe (don’t ask for statistics, I don’t have them).