As a child, English was a foreign language to me. I was never comfortable with it. I couldn't speak as well as I would have liked to nor could I get my hands around it. Not that I do now (!), but I am way better compared to, say, when I was in my 3rd standard! Any given day, I would resort to my mother tongue - Kannada.
But that didn't mean I was averse to it. In fact, I used to do crosswords and puzzles from a very early age and was quite adept at it. I remember my 2nd grade teacher asking me what 'Satan' meant and I was the only guy in a class of over 60 people to know it. But I was too shy to raise my hand and say the answer. My relationship with the language was more with the hands than with the mouth!
In fact, I remember when I was probably 8-9 years ago (around late 1980s) arguing with my mom - who was coercing me to speak in English so as to become comfortable & fluent with it - that one shouldn't speak in the language which belonged to our invaders. My point was - why should we speak the language of our erstwhile rulers after we got independence from them!
Gradually, I started getting the feel of it though. But it wasn't easy. One day, a cousin (elder brother) of mine had come to our house. This cousin was studying in a real English medium school - by that I mean not the one where people just study in English but also talk only in English with an accent that is hard to understand AND in the 1990s. I asked him about the visit and what prompted him to come, for it was not everyday that we get to see him. To this day, I remember his reply - "I was in the neighbourhood and I thought I will just drop by". I remember gaping at him, with my jaws dropped. I mean, I knew there was a word called neighbourhood and it meant something but I never knew till that very moment that it can be used in a sentence!
And on one another instance, me and my neighbour (another Bishop Cottonian or Baldwinian school) were talking about something, and he remarked - "It costed me forty bucks". I remember distinctly asking what bucks meant. He gave me that kindly paternal look which contained shock as well as amusement that I didn't know "the most commonly used" word.
And then there were some really embarrassing moments. During a visit to my cousin's (elder sister) house, I looked at the wordings she had scribbled on her room door and asked her with all innocence, a complete blank and neutral face, the face of the illiterate - "What does this thing that you have written mean? No Farting." I will leave it to you to imagine the look on my sister's face, the pregnant pause before she replied to me back with the same innocence in the language that I could understand. I will spare some adjectives and leave it to you to imagine the look on my face when I realized what I had asked and what I had made her answer.
Another one of those embarrassing moments was when my father's colleagues had come to our home. Most of them were known to me and we exchanged pleasantries after which one of them remarked "Sunday is longer than Monday." Now, how can a guy like me understand such a cryptic statement if I am not taught?! I tried to understand the statement literally and wondered why this person was telling me that Sunday was longer than Monday. With nothing else to reply, I said "Oh ok" and smiled back. Only then my father told me what it meant and I hurriedly corrected my attire. In fact the subsequent questioning by the same colleague also left me stupefied: "Are you studying for the exams hardly or very hard?" And thats when & how I learned the difference!
Added to this was this really great uncle of mine - the same one whom I mentioned in the driving post - who always asked me the English words for things I never thought had English words! Like the mirror-like reflection on the road when we are driving on a highway (mirage), the thing that joins the two coaches of trains (vestibule), the rectangular lace-like same-shaped same-sized horizontal pillars that form the bed for the parallel rails of the railway track (sleepers) and many more.
Although my grasp of the language increased and improved when I started reading novels (which kind of happened suddenly in my high school) - not because my mom was forcing me to, but because I was enjoying it - I still wasn't in anyways great in talking. I could never get on the stage and talk in English. My English teacher forced me to do that for a debate (Pros and Cons of Television) and I was having all these butterflies in the stomach while I read out loud what I had written on the piece of paper.
Me and my friends used to call all those who were talking only in English as Thames - that iconic river in England - metaphorically. It used to amuse me a lot - and sometimes even irk me - when I was seeing parents talking to children in English. By doing so, they were killing their own mother tongue and its associated heritage, culture, literature, poetry, etc. It was like the baton not being passed from parents to offsprings and thus triggering the possible extinction of a language!
At the same time, my English writing and speaking skills improved automatically, thanks to the novels and Star Plus & HBO channels that suddenly invaded the Indian Television during mid-to-late 1990s. I became a great fan of Pierce Brosnan, and his Remington Steele became my favorite. I got acquainted with the American accent.
Slowly but gradually, even without my knowing, the English language was enveloping me and I never realized it. I was talking more and more in English than in Kannada now! I suddenly was more comfortable in English than in Kannada. All those events 2-3 decades ago - me fighting against my mom about not wanting to learn English - suddenly seemed so superfluous!
Despite the knowledge and confidence of being English-friendly, there were some mild shocks during my initial days in the US (mid 2000). My first 'For Here to go' was an absolute blinder! And there is no such thing as 'Plastic Covers', we had to just ask for 'Bags' at the retail stores! And 'Overtake' meant nothing to the traffic cop, it was 'Pass'; and 'Indicator' didn't mean anything to the car repair guy, it was 'Directional', and the list goes on!
And then a decade later (late 2010), here I am with a 7-year-old daughter who is most comfortable talking English, thanks to the first 2.5 years of her schooling in US. I feel funny now - me and my wife talking in Kannada and our daughter talking & replying to us in English. This is just the kind of family-language-thingy I didn't like and didn't want about 2 decades ago looking at other such families, and here I am in the exact same situation! But, thanks to my wife and my daughter's new friends & new classmates, Tontu now talks in Kannada more than she used to talk when we left US for good - which is nice. It is amusing to hear her talk in Kannada just like how we all used to talk in our childhood. In fact, I am to be blamed more now since I resort to English words very often for the sake of convenience.
Suffice it to say that although I am trying to get back to "Kannada Days", the English language has become very much a part of my life. So much so that -
This is my 600th blog-post in Kaleidoscope!!
:-)
But that didn't mean I was averse to it. In fact, I used to do crosswords and puzzles from a very early age and was quite adept at it. I remember my 2nd grade teacher asking me what 'Satan' meant and I was the only guy in a class of over 60 people to know it. But I was too shy to raise my hand and say the answer. My relationship with the language was more with the hands than with the mouth!
In fact, I remember when I was probably 8-9 years ago (around late 1980s) arguing with my mom - who was coercing me to speak in English so as to become comfortable & fluent with it - that one shouldn't speak in the language which belonged to our invaders. My point was - why should we speak the language of our erstwhile rulers after we got independence from them!
Gradually, I started getting the feel of it though. But it wasn't easy. One day, a cousin (elder brother) of mine had come to our house. This cousin was studying in a real English medium school - by that I mean not the one where people just study in English but also talk only in English with an accent that is hard to understand AND in the 1990s. I asked him about the visit and what prompted him to come, for it was not everyday that we get to see him. To this day, I remember his reply - "I was in the neighbourhood and I thought I will just drop by". I remember gaping at him, with my jaws dropped. I mean, I knew there was a word called neighbourhood and it meant something but I never knew till that very moment that it can be used in a sentence!
And on one another instance, me and my neighbour (another Bishop Cottonian or Baldwinian school) were talking about something, and he remarked - "It costed me forty bucks". I remember distinctly asking what bucks meant. He gave me that kindly paternal look which contained shock as well as amusement that I didn't know "the most commonly used" word.
And then there were some really embarrassing moments. During a visit to my cousin's (elder sister) house, I looked at the wordings she had scribbled on her room door and asked her with all innocence, a complete blank and neutral face, the face of the illiterate - "What does this thing that you have written mean? No Farting." I will leave it to you to imagine the look on my sister's face, the pregnant pause before she replied to me back with the same innocence in the language that I could understand. I will spare some adjectives and leave it to you to imagine the look on my face when I realized what I had asked and what I had made her answer.
Another one of those embarrassing moments was when my father's colleagues had come to our home. Most of them were known to me and we exchanged pleasantries after which one of them remarked "Sunday is longer than Monday." Now, how can a guy like me understand such a cryptic statement if I am not taught?! I tried to understand the statement literally and wondered why this person was telling me that Sunday was longer than Monday. With nothing else to reply, I said "Oh ok" and smiled back. Only then my father told me what it meant and I hurriedly corrected my attire. In fact the subsequent questioning by the same colleague also left me stupefied: "Are you studying for the exams hardly or very hard?" And thats when & how I learned the difference!
Added to this was this really great uncle of mine - the same one whom I mentioned in the driving post - who always asked me the English words for things I never thought had English words! Like the mirror-like reflection on the road when we are driving on a highway (mirage), the thing that joins the two coaches of trains (vestibule), the rectangular lace-like same-shaped same-sized horizontal pillars that form the bed for the parallel rails of the railway track (sleepers) and many more.
Although my grasp of the language increased and improved when I started reading novels (which kind of happened suddenly in my high school) - not because my mom was forcing me to, but because I was enjoying it - I still wasn't in anyways great in talking. I could never get on the stage and talk in English. My English teacher forced me to do that for a debate (Pros and Cons of Television) and I was having all these butterflies in the stomach while I read out loud what I had written on the piece of paper.
Me and my friends used to call all those who were talking only in English as Thames - that iconic river in England - metaphorically. It used to amuse me a lot - and sometimes even irk me - when I was seeing parents talking to children in English. By doing so, they were killing their own mother tongue and its associated heritage, culture, literature, poetry, etc. It was like the baton not being passed from parents to offsprings and thus triggering the possible extinction of a language!
At the same time, my English writing and speaking skills improved automatically, thanks to the novels and Star Plus & HBO channels that suddenly invaded the Indian Television during mid-to-late 1990s. I became a great fan of Pierce Brosnan, and his Remington Steele became my favorite. I got acquainted with the American accent.
Slowly but gradually, even without my knowing, the English language was enveloping me and I never realized it. I was talking more and more in English than in Kannada now! I suddenly was more comfortable in English than in Kannada. All those events 2-3 decades ago - me fighting against my mom about not wanting to learn English - suddenly seemed so superfluous!
Despite the knowledge and confidence of being English-friendly, there were some mild shocks during my initial days in the US (mid 2000). My first 'For Here to go' was an absolute blinder! And there is no such thing as 'Plastic Covers', we had to just ask for 'Bags' at the retail stores! And 'Overtake' meant nothing to the traffic cop, it was 'Pass'; and 'Indicator' didn't mean anything to the car repair guy, it was 'Directional', and the list goes on!
And then a decade later (late 2010), here I am with a 7-year-old daughter who is most comfortable talking English, thanks to the first 2.5 years of her schooling in US. I feel funny now - me and my wife talking in Kannada and our daughter talking & replying to us in English. This is just the kind of family-language-thingy I didn't like and didn't want about 2 decades ago looking at other such families, and here I am in the exact same situation! But, thanks to my wife and my daughter's new friends & new classmates, Tontu now talks in Kannada more than she used to talk when we left US for good - which is nice. It is amusing to hear her talk in Kannada just like how we all used to talk in our childhood. In fact, I am to be blamed more now since I resort to English words very often for the sake of convenience.
Suffice it to say that although I am trying to get back to "Kannada Days", the English language has become very much a part of my life. So much so that -
This is my 600th blog-post in Kaleidoscope!!
:-)
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