Language Problems
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 01, 2004
Language Problems
Wonder what it is with languages that some people pick up quick, while others can never speak a word of a new language that they have had a misfortune to learn in adulthood.
My dad lived for more than a decade in Maharashtra, but never could pick up Hindi or Marathi. My mom on the other hand speaks fluent Marathi and Hindi even today. That is after having lived in Maharashtra for a decade and despite having been away for more than a decade in Tamilnadu where Hindi or Marathi is hardly spoken or heard.
I wonder if it is a male-female thing.
Could not be … because the grocer at Siddhi vinayak grocery stores in Nerul speaks English, Hindi , Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada , Telugu and Gujarati fluently . I have heard him speak to customers in all of these languages . He told me he knew Italian, German and French as well. I could not have guessed it, for I have not heard him speak those languages, and even if he did speak I would never know the difference.
And he isn’t a well travelled ambassador with Indian Foreign Service or a much transferred IAS officer or anything like that. He is a grocery shop owner by profession . Which is his family’s profession too. The entire extended family are second generation migrants from Tirunelveli , in Tamil Nadu who came down and settled in Dharavi , known famously as Asia’s largest slum.
Dharavi , although well known for many other things like leather industry and the underworld , is also a cosmopolitan slum for the poor of the world. It is a famous destination of international poverty where you would find migrants from not only all parts for India but also from South Asian countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Srilanka.
Dharavi, apart from being a ‘cosmopolitan slum’, is endowed with the blessings of Goddess Mahalakshmi the hindu goddess of wealth , whose temple is situated about 10 kilometers from Dharavi. Goddess Mahalakshmi, I am told showers prosperity on those who stick around in Dharavi for some time. She is an equal opportunity Goddess and therefore does not discriminate the Muslim cobbler, who could graduate from being a mere cobbler and prosper enough to supply leather accessories to Christian dior in France and Versacein Italy through a multiple chain of middlemen from his one room tenement in Dharavi, if he stuck around for a few decades in the famous slum.
Speaking of my grocery stores guy, the previous generation of his family, who were migrant labourers from Tirunelveli to Dharavi, prospered along with Goddess Mahalakshmi's blessings from the abundant flow of informal sector employment and small scale industry in Dharavi .
When prosperity increased and space decreased in the one room slum tenements in Dharavi, the second generation families spread over to the suburbs of Mumbai setting up ‘South Indian’ grocery shops all over the place.
Thus it is not at all surprising to observe my grocer’s proficiency in so many languages.
It is only natural that if you grow up in such industrious ‘Cosmopolitan’ surroundings it can help you master many languages. Although I am still not sure about Italian, German and French connections.
Coming back to languages, I wonder if it is difficult to pick up a new language when you are an adult. Because you cannot make too many mistakes when you speak for the fear of being laughed at .
I was well into my adulthood, when I spent about nine months in Calcutta. I was eager to learn Bengali. I can now understand spoken Bengali and speak a little bit. I sometimes even try to decipher written Bengali. I learnt doing it , by reading signboards which were written in two languages , mostly English and Bengali. Once I mastered the alphabets , I could decode the alphabets albeit slowly in Bengali . I regret not having spent a little more time in kolkata. I could have learnt one more Indian language . Pchh…
When I was about 11 -12 years of age , dad was sent for his ‘rural posting’ after his promotion as a ‘Scale 2 officer ‘ in the nationalised bank that he worked with . It was our summer vacation time when he made a pilot trip to the Rural branch , to take over from his predecessor and to fix up a house and school so that we could shift from Pune to Katol before the school term began.
Katol is a small town about 70 kms from Nagpur . If you travel by train from Chennai to Delhi on the Grand trunk express, it is a small station which falls between Nagpur and Bhopal stations.
Our house in Katol was a furnished independent house with garden on all four sides. We attempted to grow a few vegetables in the backyard and purchased milk from the opposite house. They had a big cattle shed in the back yard and a servant who milked the cows once in the morning and once in the evening. Our neighbour in the opposite house was a politically active farmer who owned large farm lands and they stocked grains in the front room of the house. The house would smell of wheat and straw along with the aroma of fresh spicy food cooking in the kitchen. It was a household that had a perpetual flow of visitors and guests coming over for lunch and dinner. It is the kind of smell that would whip up your appetite and longing to get back home for some hot home made food when you were away.
Among other things Katol ( A taluka of Nagpur district) is the largest producer of oranges after Amravati district in Maharashtra . ( Or so I was told.) A search on Google does mention Katol, but goes on to say that it is the 13th largest cultivator or oranges and not the the first or second. Anyway those were pre-google and pre-globalisation days, when WTO did not dig deep and acitvely reel out statistics on world orange production and everyone atleast in Katol believed that Katolwas indeed the second largest producer of oranges in the world .
In those days when globalisation was not rampant , Oranges from Katol were exported probably only to nearby cities or at best to faraway metros in India. In Katol Oranges were never sold or bought for money. They were so abundant that they were used by children to hit each other. It was after all less hazardous than the stones or any other household weapon. Among adults, Oranges would be picked up , tasted and carelessly thrown away if they were not as sweet as you expected or if you were not in a mood for an orange.
That was the last time I ate not only an orange , but a guava or a Sitafal , by directly plucking it from the tree. That was the last time I uprooted a ground nut shrub to eat the ground nuts beneath the root after shelling the cover . That was the last time I tasted milk that was not refrigerated or pasteurised.
When dad was on his pilot trip to Katol and asked around for the best school in the town for his children. He was referred to the ‘Convent school’. The convent school taught English and all his high ranking colleagues in the bank sent their children to the convent school. We got admission into the convent school quite easily. No interview, entrance tests or donations were asked.
We were the children of the Manager of the only bank in Town and I guess that was quite an important position in the town’s who’s who list. I am not sure if Priyanka Gandhi would have had to struggle to get into ‘Jesus and Mary college’ in New delhi . It was the same with us when it came to securing admissions into the convent school in Katol.
The school was not bad at all. The only thing that took our parents by shock ( and not us) was the fact that the ‘Convent school’ taught English no doubt but that was just another language that they taught . There were no nuns from a convent or anything like that.
Our teachers in school were normal family women and men, whose children studied in the same school. The children of the wealthier lot in town, like the daughter of the man who owned the only cinema theatre in town and the son of the town’s Municipal head and the son and daughter of the English professor at the local college of Katolstudied with us in the same school . In Katol, I and sis we were looked upon like Extra terrestrial beings, because we could speak English fluently compared to the children of the others in the 'who’s who' list .
Months later Dad discovered that ‘Convent’ was just a colloquial term for ‘English teaching schools’ . He had mistaken ‘taught English’ to be ‘Taught in English’ and had secured admissions for us. We studied English, Hindi and Marathi for languages . Mercifully Maths was in English . However Chemistry, Physics , Biology were in Marathi. So it was with history and geography. ‘Itihaas’ aani ‘bhoogol’ was how history and geography were referred to in chaste Marathi. Itihaascontained of Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and his conquests over the lustful lot of mughals . Outside of which we knew nothing else of Indian or world history. It was taught to us by a passionate history teacher clad in a white dhoti and topi.
He did not believe in text books and would recite stories about Shivaji Maharaj and his conquests to a inquisitive audience of his class. He prided himself to be a ‘Shiv sainik’.
In those days there was nothing political about it and It was not such a bad word then.
Dad was a little worried . He wanted us children to be educated in proper English medium schools. However he did not want us to waste the academic year and so we carried on for that year. If not for the ‘non English medium’ schooling issues, we would have spent a good three years in Katol, which is the minimum prescribed term for rural service , for a ‘Scale two’ bank officer .
After the end of the academic year , dad asked for a request transfer down South , citing personal reasons. He managed to get his transfer to another rural branch called Krishnarayapuram .
Krishnarayapuram is near Karur which is mid-way between the cities of Coimbatore and Tiruchy in Tamilnadu. This time he was not prepared to compromise on schooling. So he commuted about 3 hours both ways in mofussil buses to office, and we stayed in Tiruchy for our schooling.
As I mentioned earlier , in Katol we were looked upon as Extra terrestrial beings .
Whereas the residents of Tiruchy looked down on us for reasons unknown to us then. Over a period of time we learnt that it was due to our poor language skills. Although we spoke Tamil at home, it was always peppered with Hindi and Marathi . Moreover the Tamil that we spoke at home had a brahminical tinge to it.
The political scenario in Tamilnadu was such that ‘Brahmins' were a caste that was the object of ridicule and would get picked at in the movies and anywhere outside.
Most people of the caste spoke a different version of Tamil when outside of home and a different version when at home . There is a third version , which is the formal Tamil which is not spoken , but written and read. In all there were three versions that one needed to juggle with.
Initially we were oblivious to the subtle or rather not so subtle differences in the versions . It took us a few months to understand and comprehend the different versions and juggle with them . Over the months we realized that Tamil - Version One was to be spoken only at home and Tamil Version two was to be spoken in public places and the Tamil version three to be used for writing and reading .
I do not know of any other language which has so many versions. The other languages that I knew… Hindi, Marathi and English were pretty straight. Apart from certain grammatical nuances, you could speak , read and write all in the similar manner .
But Tamil was unforgiving. Not only did we have to spruce up our speaking skills, but also our writing and reading skills. In those days three languages were compulsory to be learnt in school. Every politically correct state government prescribed a curriculum for schools and ensured that the local language was a subject taught in the school. While English was the first language for English medium schools, The second language had to be Tamil if you were in Tamilnadu. You could choose between Hindi, Sanskrit and French for your third language.
We were total illiterates when it came to reading or writing Tamil. I was in seventh standard and sis in the fourth standard . And we had to study Prose, Poetry and ‘non-detail’ text books in Tamil (version three).
We came home with our progress cards after the first mid-term which indicated about 90 percent marks in all other subjects but Tamil. I scored 6 marks in Tamil. 6 marks out of fifty and that was twelve percent.
And the six marks were given because , I copied the same alphabets as in the question and repeated it for the answer to keep myself busy while others were giving the test. All the alphabets looked to me like jalebis and I hated them . The Tamil teacher probably took pity on me and gave me the six grace marks, one for each of the 6 questions that I attempted.
That was when dad panicked . He had taken a transfer from Katol for the purpose of quality education , and here his children were failing miserably and not getting a rank, leave alone a first rank because of poor proficiency in Tamil.
And that was when ‘Tamil Sir’ came into our lives. V. Periyasamy was his name. He was a lean middle aged man with a handle bar moustache greying on the sides. From what he described to my mom and dad while chatting up with them, he had two naughty school going kids at home. He lived in Tirvanaikaval , which was about 5-6 kms from our home. He cycled everyday to National boy’s high school where he taught Tamil to the boys. After school hours he cycled all the way to our home and would reach at 5.00 p.m sharp for our one hour Tamil tuitions. There was not a day when he was absent. Whether it was raining or shining, Periyasamy Sir would be there at 5.00 p.m. You could set your watch according to the time he arrived everyday. I and sis would be playing on the streets when he would ring his cycle bell announcing his arrival. We would grudgingly get home.
He would make us revise our Tamil lessons everyday and would make us write the Questions and answers for the next lesson , before the Tamil teacher at school covered it in the class.
In the quarterly exam after the first midterm, I got 36 marks out of hundred. 35 was the pass mark and I had barely scraped through. But Dad attributed this to the wonder of Tamil sir’s tuitions because this time around I got a rank in class although not a good one.
Thus ‘Tamil Sir ‘ had delivered and was retained.
I hated Tamil. It seemed to me the most complicated and difficult language to comprehend . And I hated 'Tamil Sir' all the more. He made you write the same answer five times as imposition if there was a spelling mistake or grammar mistake.
I had thought such impositions were only meant for children in standard one or standard two. I was in Standard seven and was capable of writing my own essays in English or Hindi or even Marathi . Those were the languages that I was comfortable with .
I deserved an adult ( or at least an adolescent) like treatment. I was too grown up for such silly impositions. But the man was too much of a ruthless perfectionist . He ensured we got our spellings right, we got our grammar right and that we recited at least 10-20 Tirukkurals at the end of the year.
We endured him for two years. Two long agonising years. All other subjects put together did not require as much effort as Tamil had required. And to Dad’s delight our marks in Tamil seemed to improve.
In the second year of my tuitions with him , that is when I was in eighth standard , I even shared the top marks in Tamil along with two other students. And the Tamil teacher in school remarked it as a great achievement for someone who came from the ‘north’. At home my parents were delighted, ‘Periyasamy sir’s' magic seemed to be working wonders , they remarked.
When I went to ninth standard, the 'politically correct' government changed and the current one gave us a choice.
You needed to study only two languages. English obviously was the first language for English medium schools. The choice for the second language was between Hindi and Tamil.
I was looking forward to graduating to the ninth standard , so that I would be relieved of Tamil and the ‘Tamil Sir’.
The eighth standard annual exams were round the corner. We knew we had to endure ‘Tamil Sir’ for just a little while more before exams and then the much awaited summer vacation. For me it was my last tryst with the subject.
On the day that I finished my eighth standard Tamil exam , on my way back from school, I tore the Tamil text book into two pieces and flung it into a dirty stagnant pond , with such force and fierceness , which years later would be emulated by Shoaib akhtar when he bowled across to Sachin Tendulkar at the Sharjah cricket ground. ( If you promise to come back to my blog and read ... you may take a break by clicking href="http://>http://cricket.indiatimes.com/articleshow/494071.cmsto understand the visual description)
The school that I studied in, had a scheme of giving a tuition fee free scholarship to the first rank holder of the previous year. This I am told, they did, to prevent the bright students, from moving out of the school to other schools.
I was pleasantly surprised to find on the first day of the assembly in the ninth standard , that I and sis had won the scholarship from our respective classes. Our parents were overjoyed. They were in awe of the ‘Tamil Sir’ and the wonders that he had worked on us by bringing us up to speed in Tamil. We had by then out-grown the need for him. Moreover I was out of the clutches of that loathsome ‘second’ language .
*********************
More than a decade later in Mumbai, the dubbing revolution had caught on in the small screen. Producers of Television soaps, saw tremendous business opportunity in dubbing ( giving voice over) hindi serials into South Indian languages, where Hindi was not spoken .
I happened to be involved with a theatre group, whose members were passionate about classical theatre during their free time . They all had full time jobs during the day. Theatre was hardly remunerative. In reality it would drain a lot of time and money of all those who were passionate about it. This theatre group that I knew, happened to get an offer from a television producer who wanted to tap the south Indian audiences . All it required , was to translate, and give voice over to one episode of the serial every week.
For those down south who have watched the Hindi serial ‘Junoon’ in the early 1990’s would know what I mean. It was the first of its kind translated and dubbed in Tamil and was a rage across South Indian households. It ran daily for some three years non stop.
And there was good money in it. Depending on what part you ‘dubbed’, you easily earned Rs. 400 for an episode. And Rs. 400 in those days was big time money . And it was fun too. I would take up video cassettes of the episodes that have been shot and translate them in the nights at home . Over the weekends , the entire theatre group would assemble in a dubbing studio for recording. I was one of the translators and would also give voice over for female roles.
It was fun and lot of money too.
I went to Coimbatore for a two week holiday one of these years . I decided to make a quick one day visit to Tiruchy to revive old memories. That is when I enquired about ‘Periyasamy Sir’ and went visiting.
When I look back I marvel at his sense of discipline . He would cycle all the way from National boy’s high school to our home for a one hour tuition class that would fetch him an extra Rs.100 a month . And he did that diligently for two years, come rain or flood or riots.
Believe me, we had Tamil tuitions even on the day when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. The school had closed down early in anticipation of violence. We came back home early in the afternoon and were enjoying ourselves on the streets on that unexpected holiday, when the familiar cycle bell clattered at 5.00 p.m. To say , we were Exasperated would be an understatement.
But then, looking back, I wonder if we still get such dedicated teachers in school these days .
Much to my disappointment ‘Periyasamy Sir’ was not at home . His wife said that he was out of town and would return only the next day . I could not wait till the next day because I had to get back to Coimbatore . So I left him a note saying I had come, mentioned about my current whereabouts and my more recent dubbing and translation endeavours from Hindi to Tamil .
Writing a thank you note to him in Tamil was not easy.
I am not sure if there were spelling or grammar mistakes in the note that I left for him. May be there were not any. Otherwise he would have got back to me asking me to write the imposition five times.
My dad lived for more than a decade in Maharashtra, but never could pick up Hindi or Marathi. My mom on the other hand speaks fluent Marathi and Hindi even today. That is after having lived in Maharashtra for a decade and despite having been away for more than a decade in Tamilnadu where Hindi or Marathi is hardly spoken or heard.
I wonder if it is a male-female thing.
Could not be … because the grocer at Siddhi vinayak grocery stores in Nerul speaks English, Hindi , Marathi, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada , Telugu and Gujarati fluently . I have heard him speak to customers in all of these languages . He told me he knew Italian, German and French as well. I could not have guessed it, for I have not heard him speak those languages, and even if he did speak I would never know the difference.
And he isn’t a well travelled ambassador with Indian Foreign Service or a much transferred IAS officer or anything like that. He is a grocery shop owner by profession . Which is his family’s profession too. The entire extended family are second generation migrants from Tirunelveli , in Tamil Nadu who came down and settled in Dharavi , known famously as Asia’s largest slum.
Dharavi , although well known for many other things like leather industry and the underworld , is also a cosmopolitan slum for the poor of the world. It is a famous destination of international poverty where you would find migrants from not only all parts for India but also from South Asian countries like Bangladesh, Pakistan and Srilanka.
Dharavi, apart from being a ‘cosmopolitan slum’, is endowed with the blessings of Goddess Mahalakshmi the hindu goddess of wealth , whose temple is situated about 10 kilometers from Dharavi. Goddess Mahalakshmi, I am told showers prosperity on those who stick around in Dharavi for some time. She is an equal opportunity Goddess and therefore does not discriminate the Muslim cobbler, who could graduate from being a mere cobbler and prosper enough to supply leather accessories to Christian dior in France and Versacein Italy through a multiple chain of middlemen from his one room tenement in Dharavi, if he stuck around for a few decades in the famous slum.
Speaking of my grocery stores guy, the previous generation of his family, who were migrant labourers from Tirunelveli to Dharavi, prospered along with Goddess Mahalakshmi's blessings from the abundant flow of informal sector employment and small scale industry in Dharavi .
When prosperity increased and space decreased in the one room slum tenements in Dharavi, the second generation families spread over to the suburbs of Mumbai setting up ‘South Indian’ grocery shops all over the place.
Thus it is not at all surprising to observe my grocer’s proficiency in so many languages.
It is only natural that if you grow up in such industrious ‘Cosmopolitan’ surroundings it can help you master many languages. Although I am still not sure about Italian, German and French connections.
Coming back to languages, I wonder if it is difficult to pick up a new language when you are an adult. Because you cannot make too many mistakes when you speak for the fear of being laughed at .
I was well into my adulthood, when I spent about nine months in Calcutta. I was eager to learn Bengali. I can now understand spoken Bengali and speak a little bit. I sometimes even try to decipher written Bengali. I learnt doing it , by reading signboards which were written in two languages , mostly English and Bengali. Once I mastered the alphabets , I could decode the alphabets albeit slowly in Bengali . I regret not having spent a little more time in kolkata. I could have learnt one more Indian language . Pchh…
When I was about 11 -12 years of age , dad was sent for his ‘rural posting’ after his promotion as a ‘Scale 2 officer ‘ in the nationalised bank that he worked with . It was our summer vacation time when he made a pilot trip to the Rural branch , to take over from his predecessor and to fix up a house and school so that we could shift from Pune to Katol before the school term began.
Katol is a small town about 70 kms from Nagpur . If you travel by train from Chennai to Delhi on the Grand trunk express, it is a small station which falls between Nagpur and Bhopal stations.
Our house in Katol was a furnished independent house with garden on all four sides. We attempted to grow a few vegetables in the backyard and purchased milk from the opposite house. They had a big cattle shed in the back yard and a servant who milked the cows once in the morning and once in the evening. Our neighbour in the opposite house was a politically active farmer who owned large farm lands and they stocked grains in the front room of the house. The house would smell of wheat and straw along with the aroma of fresh spicy food cooking in the kitchen. It was a household that had a perpetual flow of visitors and guests coming over for lunch and dinner. It is the kind of smell that would whip up your appetite and longing to get back home for some hot home made food when you were away.
Among other things Katol ( A taluka of Nagpur district) is the largest producer of oranges after Amravati district in Maharashtra . ( Or so I was told.) A search on Google does mention Katol, but goes on to say that it is the 13th largest cultivator or oranges and not the the first or second. Anyway those were pre-google and pre-globalisation days, when WTO did not dig deep and acitvely reel out statistics on world orange production and everyone atleast in Katol believed that Katolwas indeed the second largest producer of oranges in the world .
In those days when globalisation was not rampant , Oranges from Katol were exported probably only to nearby cities or at best to faraway metros in India. In Katol Oranges were never sold or bought for money. They were so abundant that they were used by children to hit each other. It was after all less hazardous than the stones or any other household weapon. Among adults, Oranges would be picked up , tasted and carelessly thrown away if they were not as sweet as you expected or if you were not in a mood for an orange.
That was the last time I ate not only an orange , but a guava or a Sitafal , by directly plucking it from the tree. That was the last time I uprooted a ground nut shrub to eat the ground nuts beneath the root after shelling the cover . That was the last time I tasted milk that was not refrigerated or pasteurised.
When dad was on his pilot trip to Katol and asked around for the best school in the town for his children. He was referred to the ‘Convent school’. The convent school taught English and all his high ranking colleagues in the bank sent their children to the convent school. We got admission into the convent school quite easily. No interview, entrance tests or donations were asked.
We were the children of the Manager of the only bank in Town and I guess that was quite an important position in the town’s who’s who list. I am not sure if Priyanka Gandhi would have had to struggle to get into ‘Jesus and Mary college’ in New delhi . It was the same with us when it came to securing admissions into the convent school in Katol.
The school was not bad at all. The only thing that took our parents by shock ( and not us) was the fact that the ‘Convent school’ taught English no doubt but that was just another language that they taught . There were no nuns from a convent or anything like that.
Our teachers in school were normal family women and men, whose children studied in the same school. The children of the wealthier lot in town, like the daughter of the man who owned the only cinema theatre in town and the son of the town’s Municipal head and the son and daughter of the English professor at the local college of Katolstudied with us in the same school . In Katol, I and sis we were looked upon like Extra terrestrial beings, because we could speak English fluently compared to the children of the others in the 'who’s who' list .
Months later Dad discovered that ‘Convent’ was just a colloquial term for ‘English teaching schools’ . He had mistaken ‘taught English’ to be ‘Taught in English’ and had secured admissions for us. We studied English, Hindi and Marathi for languages . Mercifully Maths was in English . However Chemistry, Physics , Biology were in Marathi. So it was with history and geography. ‘Itihaas’ aani ‘bhoogol’ was how history and geography were referred to in chaste Marathi. Itihaascontained of Chatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and his conquests over the lustful lot of mughals . Outside of which we knew nothing else of Indian or world history. It was taught to us by a passionate history teacher clad in a white dhoti and topi.
He did not believe in text books and would recite stories about Shivaji Maharaj and his conquests to a inquisitive audience of his class. He prided himself to be a ‘Shiv sainik’.
In those days there was nothing political about it and It was not such a bad word then.
Dad was a little worried . He wanted us children to be educated in proper English medium schools. However he did not want us to waste the academic year and so we carried on for that year. If not for the ‘non English medium’ schooling issues, we would have spent a good three years in Katol, which is the minimum prescribed term for rural service , for a ‘Scale two’ bank officer .
After the end of the academic year , dad asked for a request transfer down South , citing personal reasons. He managed to get his transfer to another rural branch called Krishnarayapuram .
Krishnarayapuram is near Karur which is mid-way between the cities of Coimbatore and Tiruchy in Tamilnadu. This time he was not prepared to compromise on schooling. So he commuted about 3 hours both ways in mofussil buses to office, and we stayed in Tiruchy for our schooling.
As I mentioned earlier , in Katol we were looked upon as Extra terrestrial beings .
Whereas the residents of Tiruchy looked down on us for reasons unknown to us then. Over a period of time we learnt that it was due to our poor language skills. Although we spoke Tamil at home, it was always peppered with Hindi and Marathi . Moreover the Tamil that we spoke at home had a brahminical tinge to it.
The political scenario in Tamilnadu was such that ‘Brahmins' were a caste that was the object of ridicule and would get picked at in the movies and anywhere outside.
Most people of the caste spoke a different version of Tamil when outside of home and a different version when at home . There is a third version , which is the formal Tamil which is not spoken , but written and read. In all there were three versions that one needed to juggle with.
Initially we were oblivious to the subtle or rather not so subtle differences in the versions . It took us a few months to understand and comprehend the different versions and juggle with them . Over the months we realized that Tamil - Version One was to be spoken only at home and Tamil Version two was to be spoken in public places and the Tamil version three to be used for writing and reading .
I do not know of any other language which has so many versions. The other languages that I knew… Hindi, Marathi and English were pretty straight. Apart from certain grammatical nuances, you could speak , read and write all in the similar manner .
But Tamil was unforgiving. Not only did we have to spruce up our speaking skills, but also our writing and reading skills. In those days three languages were compulsory to be learnt in school. Every politically correct state government prescribed a curriculum for schools and ensured that the local language was a subject taught in the school. While English was the first language for English medium schools, The second language had to be Tamil if you were in Tamilnadu. You could choose between Hindi, Sanskrit and French for your third language.
We were total illiterates when it came to reading or writing Tamil. I was in seventh standard and sis in the fourth standard . And we had to study Prose, Poetry and ‘non-detail’ text books in Tamil (version three).
We came home with our progress cards after the first mid-term which indicated about 90 percent marks in all other subjects but Tamil. I scored 6 marks in Tamil. 6 marks out of fifty and that was twelve percent.
And the six marks were given because , I copied the same alphabets as in the question and repeated it for the answer to keep myself busy while others were giving the test. All the alphabets looked to me like jalebis and I hated them . The Tamil teacher probably took pity on me and gave me the six grace marks, one for each of the 6 questions that I attempted.
That was when dad panicked . He had taken a transfer from Katol for the purpose of quality education , and here his children were failing miserably and not getting a rank, leave alone a first rank because of poor proficiency in Tamil.
And that was when ‘Tamil Sir’ came into our lives. V. Periyasamy was his name. He was a lean middle aged man with a handle bar moustache greying on the sides. From what he described to my mom and dad while chatting up with them, he had two naughty school going kids at home. He lived in Tirvanaikaval , which was about 5-6 kms from our home. He cycled everyday to National boy’s high school where he taught Tamil to the boys. After school hours he cycled all the way to our home and would reach at 5.00 p.m sharp for our one hour Tamil tuitions. There was not a day when he was absent. Whether it was raining or shining, Periyasamy Sir would be there at 5.00 p.m. You could set your watch according to the time he arrived everyday. I and sis would be playing on the streets when he would ring his cycle bell announcing his arrival. We would grudgingly get home.
He would make us revise our Tamil lessons everyday and would make us write the Questions and answers for the next lesson , before the Tamil teacher at school covered it in the class.
In the quarterly exam after the first midterm, I got 36 marks out of hundred. 35 was the pass mark and I had barely scraped through. But Dad attributed this to the wonder of Tamil sir’s tuitions because this time around I got a rank in class although not a good one.
Thus ‘Tamil Sir ‘ had delivered and was retained.
I hated Tamil. It seemed to me the most complicated and difficult language to comprehend . And I hated 'Tamil Sir' all the more. He made you write the same answer five times as imposition if there was a spelling mistake or grammar mistake.
I had thought such impositions were only meant for children in standard one or standard two. I was in Standard seven and was capable of writing my own essays in English or Hindi or even Marathi . Those were the languages that I was comfortable with .
I deserved an adult ( or at least an adolescent) like treatment. I was too grown up for such silly impositions. But the man was too much of a ruthless perfectionist . He ensured we got our spellings right, we got our grammar right and that we recited at least 10-20 Tirukkurals at the end of the year.
We endured him for two years. Two long agonising years. All other subjects put together did not require as much effort as Tamil had required. And to Dad’s delight our marks in Tamil seemed to improve.
In the second year of my tuitions with him , that is when I was in eighth standard , I even shared the top marks in Tamil along with two other students. And the Tamil teacher in school remarked it as a great achievement for someone who came from the ‘north’. At home my parents were delighted, ‘Periyasamy sir’s' magic seemed to be working wonders , they remarked.
When I went to ninth standard, the 'politically correct' government changed and the current one gave us a choice.
You needed to study only two languages. English obviously was the first language for English medium schools. The choice for the second language was between Hindi and Tamil.
I was looking forward to graduating to the ninth standard , so that I would be relieved of Tamil and the ‘Tamil Sir’.
The eighth standard annual exams were round the corner. We knew we had to endure ‘Tamil Sir’ for just a little while more before exams and then the much awaited summer vacation. For me it was my last tryst with the subject.
On the day that I finished my eighth standard Tamil exam , on my way back from school, I tore the Tamil text book into two pieces and flung it into a dirty stagnant pond , with such force and fierceness , which years later would be emulated by Shoaib akhtar when he bowled across to Sachin Tendulkar at the Sharjah cricket ground. ( If you promise to come back to my blog and read ... you may take a break by clicking href="http://>http://cricket.indiatimes.com/articleshow/494071.cms
The school that I studied in, had a scheme of giving a tuition fee free scholarship to the first rank holder of the previous year. This I am told, they did, to prevent the bright students, from moving out of the school to other schools.
I was pleasantly surprised to find on the first day of the assembly in the ninth standard , that I and sis had won the scholarship from our respective classes. Our parents were overjoyed. They were in awe of the ‘Tamil Sir’ and the wonders that he had worked on us by bringing us up to speed in Tamil. We had by then out-grown the need for him. Moreover I was out of the clutches of that loathsome ‘second’ language .
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More than a decade later in Mumbai, the dubbing revolution had caught on in the small screen. Producers of Television soaps, saw tremendous business opportunity in dubbing ( giving voice over) hindi serials into South Indian languages, where Hindi was not spoken .
I happened to be involved with a theatre group, whose members were passionate about classical theatre during their free time . They all had full time jobs during the day. Theatre was hardly remunerative. In reality it would drain a lot of time and money of all those who were passionate about it. This theatre group that I knew, happened to get an offer from a television producer who wanted to tap the south Indian audiences . All it required , was to translate, and give voice over to one episode of the serial every week.
For those down south who have watched the Hindi serial ‘Junoon’ in the early 1990’s would know what I mean. It was the first of its kind translated and dubbed in Tamil and was a rage across South Indian households. It ran daily for some three years non stop.
And there was good money in it. Depending on what part you ‘dubbed’, you easily earned Rs. 400 for an episode. And Rs. 400 in those days was big time money . And it was fun too. I would take up video cassettes of the episodes that have been shot and translate them in the nights at home . Over the weekends , the entire theatre group would assemble in a dubbing studio for recording. I was one of the translators and would also give voice over for female roles.
It was fun and lot of money too.
I went to Coimbatore for a two week holiday one of these years . I decided to make a quick one day visit to Tiruchy to revive old memories. That is when I enquired about ‘Periyasamy Sir’ and went visiting.
When I look back I marvel at his sense of discipline . He would cycle all the way from National boy’s high school to our home for a one hour tuition class that would fetch him an extra Rs.100 a month . And he did that diligently for two years, come rain or flood or riots.
Believe me, we had Tamil tuitions even on the day when Indira Gandhi was assassinated. The school had closed down early in anticipation of violence. We came back home early in the afternoon and were enjoying ourselves on the streets on that unexpected holiday, when the familiar cycle bell clattered at 5.00 p.m. To say , we were Exasperated would be an understatement.
But then, looking back, I wonder if we still get such dedicated teachers in school these days .
Much to my disappointment ‘Periyasamy Sir’ was not at home . His wife said that he was out of town and would return only the next day . I could not wait till the next day because I had to get back to Coimbatore . So I left him a note saying I had come, mentioned about my current whereabouts and my more recent dubbing and translation endeavours from Hindi to Tamil .
Writing a thank you note to him in Tamil was not easy.
I am not sure if there were spelling or grammar mistakes in the note that I left for him. May be there were not any. Otherwise he would have got back to me asking me to write the imposition five times.
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