This started with
a casual talk over the phone when one of my friends used a Hindi word I was a
little doubtful of comprehending well. On confirming the meaning, I could sense
a raised eyebrow in her voice. "Didn't you know it's meaning!!" Well,
I said "I haven't used the word, yet I could conceive its meaning.
Nonetheless I thought I would double check." The original conversation,
however drifted on Hindi Language discussion. I was confident having studied
the subject up till my tenth standard and having scored a good percentage in
the boards that I knew the language well. My friend thought of getting the
better of me and threw a challenge. She asked me to spell the Hindi word
'Adhyyan'. Of Course, I could not rant it. I don't remember having ever learnt the
Hindi spellings orally. But I really wanted to pen it down and show it to her.
Hindi is my mother tongue after all! And if mother is the adjective then the
diction gets revered.
Thus,
retrospection followed. I cogitated, how often did I read or write Hindi? Let
me list. The only occasion when I regularly use Hindi and Sanskrit is my daily
worship time. This is the only hour I chant the complete sentences in
either of the two languages. The list finishes before it begins! My daily
conversation with everyone around me is a trilingual comprising of English,
Hindi and a little Kannada. Alas! Eight long years in Bengaluru and only a wee
bit of Kannada. Not only does my tongue refuse to roll in the right tenor, my
ears are also incapable of capturing the exact vibrations when someone speaks
to me in the local and my strained mind just gives up! But that's another
story.
I was in the sixth
standard when I wrote a letter to my grandfather to which he replied in
Sanskrit. The learned man that he was, it took me the entire summer vacation to
be able to read and understand his writing myself. The 'shlokas' carried his
deep rooted advice. The letter was my priceless possession.
So, how do we
start speaking? The first dialect we hear our parents repeat for us umpteen
number of times, comes naturally to us. When I took my two years old daughter
to my sister's wedding, now you can imagine the big family gathering on
weddings, I got the shock of my life! My little toddler was unable to reply to
everyone in Hindi. The loquacious lassie that she is, she would definitely
reply to the uncomprehended questions in English. Thus, my aunts and uncles
promptly commented "you're raising this kid as a 'Firangi'!". I was
flabbergasted! This was a feedback and I knew I need to work on it. Many of us
have witnessed the civilised society folks gape bafflingly when they hear our
toddlers declaim their minds out in English. Language is such a pure form of
communication. It's unjustified to rate one over the other. The more languages one
knows and the fluency with which one can speak demonstrates one's richness.
Thus, the bedtime stories these nights are the likes of
“huwa vivaad saday
nirday mein,
Ubhay aagrahi
the swavishay mein,
Gayee baat
tab nyaayaalay mein,
Sunee sabhi
ne jaani.
Sunee sabhi ne
jaani, vyapak hui kahani!”
