Darwin’s
theory of evolution could perhaps be well extended to languages – while other
European languages like Greek turned more and more concentrated in influence if
not really obsolete, English, surviving as the fittest, has only evolved. The
world today is a global village, and English is its vernacular. If mathematics
is the language of science, English, certainly is the dialect in which
scientists put their mathematical language forms. Board room discussions of
corporate directors to a fire-and-riposte rally in the interview room, English
is omnipresent. Good English speech makes an educated man urbane, and a rich
man sophisticated. It’s a ubiquitous utility vested into panoply of uses;
earning a nine-to-five subsistence for an average IT industry worker to being
the elitist nucleus of a connoisseur of English literature.
When I
was young, my parents sung in unison with my teachers about the importance of
Mathematics and Science – they wanted me to be an engineer; and those subjects
alone would make me one. I was never particularly encouraged to develop reading
habits. I remember the first time I brought a novel home from the school
library; it was Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. Dare I spend more
than a couple of hours at stretch reading the novel; I would find my mother
glare sternly, declaring that it was enough and I better resume my study. In
hindsight, now I understand their reasons; literature was merely ‘story books’
for them; and what treasures did stories hold for a family which constantly
struggled through the banalities of middle class life, counting upon its
progeny to bring a better sense of well-being? The world of imagination, as
they believed, was for leisure; and leisure was a luxury for the ambitious
middle class. Rather, they were beckoned by more meaningful subjects like
mathematics. It made me queasy to see that my peers and classmates believed the
same, as did my teachers. The student who scored highest in mathematics was
held as the brightest, the favorite of our class teacher. English was taught
and studied merely for the matter of memorizing answers and reproducing them in
the examination to get marks. When I topped my class obtaining the highest
marks in mathematics and physics, my parents rewarded me with a bicycle;
perhaps they never seemed to notice that I always got the highest in English.
Thus grew the most of us, great at churning sums and solving equations, although
mediocre in communication skills, particularly so in English. While the former
got my friends, myself included, into engineering and medical colleges; my
peers who used to smugly sit in center of group photographs as toppers, today
are faced with a ghastly realization that their head start has begun to run out
and something that they always escaped from has not only caught up with them,
but is thwarting their ambitions! Having sat clueless through placement group
discussions has made them frustrated, and they have grown very self-conscious
about how they have to search for words in a formal conversation, which to
their loathing, is always in English. They need others to help them write their
resume and rationale, and they hate to climb up the stage to address a
gathering because they end up twisting their coat-ends in nervousness more than
they speak. We have become quality engineers, great doctors, only that our
voice is muted. Given the portentous
fact that English alone, from the United Nations to the United Coffee Bar, shall
be the courier of our ideas and a prima facie token of our worth, the problems
and prospects of developing skills in English are indeed worth contemplation.
The
nature of education in our country is as diversified as the
country itself. In the metropolitan cities, we have schools like the DPS chain where
the students laugh in English, weep in English, fight in English, eat their
tiffin in English and go home in English; their speech wearing an imitation
veneer of the accent from the Hollywood movies they grow up watching. While I
stood waiting outside St. Xavier’s School, Kolkata for one of my engineering
entrance exams, I saw a lady emerge out of her Honda Accord. A large Gucci bag
dangled by her arm while she coaxed her little girl out of the car, “Let him
stay in the car, darling! Come, now! A chocolate for my Sweety when she comes
home”, she said in a sing-song manner. The little girl pouted. “No, Mommy!
Please let me take Toby along!” Although I had no idea who or what Toby was, it
was apparent that English came as naturally to this little kid as water came to
ducks. I wondered if ever a day would come when, in my village, the milkman’s
wife would ask her son, in English, to pass her the milk bucket. Immediately, I
smiled at how ridiculous the thought was – for not even our English teacher
cared to speak to us in English, unless he was reading a chapter to the class.
To date, in most government schools, English speech is a fancy thing. It is
usually reserved for the Independence and Republic Day.
It must
be realized that a language is more than merely a medium to express our ideas;
only if the machinery of mental conception is linked with the loom of a
particular language, can a seamless yarn of speech be produced. But the
quintessential language pedagogy in most Indian schools depends heavily on the
tool of translation. We conceived ideas in our own mother tongue, translated
them into English, and reproduced them. And this reflected into our speech in
form of embarrassing pauses and stutters. Even in my college, almost every
student with a vernacular medium of schooling has his speech ridden by such
fumbling and this spoils his chances wherever English occupies the spearhead of
first impressions. Not only in speech, this tool of translation betrays itself
even in our writings when we inadvertently omit articles (Give me ice cream,
for example). It must be realized that while translation remolds ideas from one
language to another; it is utterly handicapped to carry over the same essence
and originality – Hamlet, for example, is best relished only when read
unabridged; not even a prosaic abridgment carries the same beauty. Thus,
instead of using a conspicuous, jerk-starting mental translator, we must imbue
the very paradigm of synthesis of the English language itself. Translation can
be used in the beginning to point the linguistic analogies, but once a
threshold of familiarity with the language is reached, one must be encouraged
to develop an independent and original approach to the language. Look at the
world through glasses tinted English: feeling tiresome while
you are writing your translation homework, peer outside
the windows; does the playground beckon to you? Ah, it
does! But father is at home! Reluctantly though, you continue to
do your homework.
Tiresome, peer, beckon, reluctantly; as soon as you can learn to feel these
words just exactly how you felt the emotions associated with them, know that
your mind has begun to sprout creepers that are rapidly climbing over the
linguistic tower of English. Think and reproduce. Effective speech is a conscious
exercise; translation reduces it to voluntary action which is
subject to its own imperfections.
A useful
exercise through which the mind can be conditioned into thinking in English is
through observing how people who are accomplished in this domain go about it.
Watching news debates and movies is the easiest way; although a more beneficial
way would be to inculcate a habit of newspaper reading. Novels and magazines
also help build a solid linguistic intuition. Just like a little child grows to
speak in the manner of the people around him (don’t stay among people too older
to you is what my parents told me, and it was for good reason), our speech
evolves in the same way. Hence, practicing continuously to talk and think in
English is conducive towards the objective we have been talking about.
Reading
habits, of course, shall remain the most important pillars upon which the so
called linguistic tower of English stands. No matter how many movies one has
watched, his or her language skills can never reach their epoch unless and
until he is well read. Literature is the mirror of the society; reading works
by great authors help us enrich our own vocabulary, thinking paradigm and grants
us another perspective. As I have emphasized throughout this essay, language is
merely a means of reproduction of ideas, but how shall one have ideas if the
vision of the mind is limited by the vision of the eyes? Books, novels, epics;
read, and you shall see. Sitting in your own room, The Invisible Man (H. G.
Wells) takes you across different eras of the world you can never possibly go.
Read Sherlock Holmes, and you shall be taken across streets of London, learning
about the lifestyles of the people, their ways to earn a livelihood, their food
habits, and subjects of their fear and joys. Literature is like travelling
without having to move a foot! Literature is about feeling emotions without
being subject to the actual stimuli; the opening chapter of D. H. Lawrence’s
Women in Love makes you sit invisibly behind the Brangwen cousins Ursula and
Gudrun while they bicker among themselves, watching a marriage procession
through their window. Reading puts you into the agile, observant mind of a
sleuth; echoes in you the heart rending melancholy of a bereft lover; and makes
you a witness to the glories of kings and their battles and the unflinching
resilience of the human spirit to brave failures. Which of these would we
experience in our own short, confined lives? God created man, and man couldn’t
be everywhere, so he created literature. Having gained yards upon the horizons
of perspective (and all in English), good reading habits are grist to the
linguistic mills of an individual.
Reading
quality literature also helps us develop an intuition about conformity with
grammar. In our school days, we were made to memorize the rules of grammar,
subject verb agreements, et al. While a basic understanding and knowledge of
the grammar rules is indeed essential, memorizing them like calendar dates
makes it such a morose, colossal task that it begins to dishearten the most enthusiastic
of us. I have observed for myself that the English grammar is not rigidly cast
but it rests upon pliant foundations; and most easy and interesting way to
understand grammar is extensive reading: it fills us with an intuitive sense of
the rights, wrongs and the cardinal sins. A modern individual is expected to be
grammatically precise; yet literature enjoins us to eschew from turning into a
sworn purist; for the flexibility is an inherent beauty of this language and
puritanism cripples it. Had James Joyce given way to the purist scowls of his
critics, we would have never seen a masterpiece like Ulysses, noted for its
unconventional styles of expression like stream of consciousness.
Unfortunately,
our school curriculum has been so designed that the role of literature is limited
merely to comprehension, encouraging us to mug up passages to write answers
from; and commit to heart the notes that our teachers give about the poems
which, allegedly, are too difficult and sophisticated to be understood on our
own. How futile! Why would one need notes to empathize with the laments of
Shelley, as he cries to the West Wind, “I fall upon the thorns of life, I
bleed!” Poetry and literature are not numbers to be crunched, neither are they
dates to be memorized. They are emotions to be empathized with, ideas to be
understood with a new perspective. Let us not be machines which treat every
input in white and black. Literature is about life, and life has shades of
gray.
Nothing
has a more direct influence on our writing style as the habits of our reading.
Most of us, either due to our upbringing or due to our difference in tastes and
interests, are poorly read. The writing on the wall dictates that a person who
has not read much will never write much. Even if you are a poorly read person
but with raging, ingenious ideas, your writings shall merely be bland if anything
at all, just pearls of wisdom scattered everywhere on the paper but eventually
of little acclaim. Just as a diamond needs to be cut and polished to shine
brilliantly, our mind needs to be serrated under the stone of books and angled
and jagged through the incisive writings of others before it can be used as a
blazing literary spear which can stab through the conscience of its readers and
suffuse its message right into their hearts. Good reading habits string those
scattered pearls of wisdom into a fine garland that adorns every sheet of paper
it is put across. Needless to say, great writing skills are of great demand in
the modern world. A poorly written resume can cost you job opportunities, and a
minor glitch in a professional email can get you fired from your job! Whether
we like it or not, it is required of us to have a good level of competence when
it comes to writing style, and it can only be developed through good reading
habits supplemented by lots of practice in writing.
Talking
about practice, I noted that only a handful of us are in a consistent habit of
maintaining a diary or a journal. Either we are held up by activities that
appear more interesting, or we never cared to give it a try. A very personal
relationship between the mind and the pen blossoms inside the pages of one’s
diary, and like every relationship, it only grows more and more intimate. This
intimacy opens the floodgates through which a deluge of emotions pours down in
ink, resulting into a very beautiful, personal style of effortless writing. It
also helps as a writer if one gets associated with campus magazines, writing
reports and essays on current events and developments. Just like the
handwriting of an infant, the writing style of an individual begins from a
clumsy, unstructured and inchoate potpourri of ideas; but time and practice
placate it into a lucid, meandering flow.
Rome was
not built in a day, and the adage goes apt for one’s vocabulary. Just as no
twins are identically same, no two synonyms are identical either. Since words
constitute sentences and sentences constitute writing or speech, it is of
fundamental importance to have a good stock of words in one’s mind. A precise
knowledge of words and their meanings lead to our own mental development; we
can think and express more precisely, which is the next step from a good
writing to a scholarly lucubration. However, often I have seen students trying
to jump fences and cut corners; using a thesaurus as a writing aid; replacing
commonly used words with what they perceive as fanciful, ornamental
substitutes; which is only retrogressive. Like the calloused palms of an old
farmer, a sumptuous vocabulary comes after ages of voracious reading. Writing
with a thesaurus at one's side is not writing, but merely an ostentatious antic,
a greatest sacrilege of its kind; to be understood as a literary magician while
you are merely pulling tricks. Key to a good vocabulary? Read, read and read.
Take notes. Use the new words in your own writings. Finally, read, read, and
read.
The key
to fluent speaking in English is no different from what has already been
discussed, except that it needs more practice. One needs to counter
inhibitions, complexes, confidence issues before one can be lay his claim to
the skills of Mark Antony. Group discussions, Job interviews, presentations –
every professional arena is replete with instances where one has to rise and
speak for himself. A good speaker has an impressive personality (and conversely
so), he earns more admiration socially and more opportunities professionally.
But again, it is a gradual process. One must turn a blind eye to jests by
lesser enlightened peers (they exist everywhere) who love to mock at one’s
efforts at developing good speaking skills. Taking part in debates, declamation
contests, and extempore speeches right from the school level helps one get rid
of the stage fright which a newbie is typically gripped with.
Pronunciation is another factor that greatly troubles most of the students who
have grown up more or less with their tongues swathed in a vernacular or a
dialect. While there does exist a branch of linguistics called Phonetics, and a
standardized method of pronunciation laid down as RP (Received Pronunciation);
they are to be perused only by a student who harbors a desire for a greater,
quasi-perfect finesse. One should not concern himself unduly unless the accent
is laid with a heavy vernacular twang, as for most of us, the exposure that
regular speaking (along with watching others speak on television, news and
movies) gives usually serves as a natural rectifier of accent.
English
is a funny language. It has grammar that has more exceptions than rules; it
demands of us often to spell differently than we write; it says things it does
not mean (hanging out, for instance), and it always seeks short cuts (ain’t
it?). But the beauty of English lies in the very fact that it does not seek to
conform to the conventional yardsticks of a beautiful language. This is the
trait that has helped English last, evolve and proliferate in influence over
centuries. If we are to seek acceptance in a much Anglicized era of today, we must
be well versed and adept in the tongue that the world speaks in. Learning,
writing in, speaking in and understanding English is not difficult; only that
one needs to be patient and persistent. If a nursery kid from Kolkata could
speak English, I can write with certitude that all of us, no matter what our
background has been, can be adept in this language that has come to be
recognized as the lingua franca of the successful.
References: Based solely upon personal
introspection.
