This paper analyzes narratives about the radical socio-economic changes accompanying liberalization in India to consider how English-medium schooling is becoming an aspirational resource for non-elite parents. I suggest that aspiring is a practice of ethics that marginalized mothers mobilize to negotiate memories of deprivation and yearnings for good futures, in the present. Meanwhile, educators' specific shaming of non-elite aspirations for English schooling reveals their anxieties concerning disrupted local hierarchies, symbolized by non-elite English schooling.