Feature by Alok Saini
Dear Whosoever Is Going to Read This:
Growing up in the 80s, no one in my family or neighbourhood spoke in English.
In a perfectly Indian middle-class environment, people knew acceptable English to use in offices
and schools. Still, no one used English in daily conversations.
Even at school, it was more of a subject to study, something to be decent at, and less of a natural medium to converse with peers.
I don’t know why and how, but very early in my teenage, I developed this keen desire to learn conversational English and stand apart from everyone around me. I borrowed a lot of library books, rented a lot of American movies, and tried hard to decipher songs on the two hours of weekday MTV we got on Doordarshan.
There was no internet-enabled quick lyrics check, and it was pretty late in life that I realised I was singing many of those songs wrong. The movies, on the other hand, did teach me slang and helped me develop a natural ease with spoken English.
Of course, those books have had the most long-standing impact…enhancing my vocabulary and shaping my storytelling abilities, despite the lack of pronunciation practice.
Things have changed in the last three decades.
English is the default language of conversation at the workplace. At home, my wife and I talk more than half the time in English, and nearly ninety per cent of our media consumption, what we see, read or listen to, is in English.
More often than not, I have to make a deliberate effort to write in Hindi, my mother tongue. And that
hurts.
Sometimes, I wonder if I will have a second teenage when I wish to stand apart from the crowd by consciously choosing Hindi over English.
I’ll have to let my heart make that choice.
That reminds me. At times, I still read ‘heart’ as ‘hurt’ before correcting myself. (And realising
there’s not much difference between the two.)