A Tribute to the Language ‘Gurus’

On ‘Guru Purnima’ its time to respectfully remember those who imparted knowledge and wisdom to us (to whatever extent possible !). The realistic list is quite illustrious – parents, family elders, our school teachers, great seniors in service life and old friends who we grew up with. But, if we were to talk of communication skills, most of us would credit our language teachers of our early school days for grinding in us the fundamentals of good writing and basics of the spoken word. It was due to their mastery over the subject (the language) that we found some of our brighter classmates becoming proficient in both Hindi and English (in hometown Lucknow)

In the English medium schools, imbibing good proficiency in English has always been stressed, which many argue remains a hangover from our colonial past. Due to the fact that quite a few have regional languages as their mother tongue, many of us, could be reasonably comfortable in finding the apt expressions in English but flounder to find the right words in Hindi for, as one of my teachers said ‘You will express yourself best in the language that you think’! I, for one, had a tough time with my Hindi Sir who tried his best to ‘sanitise’ my Bengali laden Hindi for a first few years.His efforts bore fruit and with time my grammar and ‘Bhasha’ improved.

Coming back to English, I recall that teachers in school would invariably choose words which would not only sound alien but wise. The pronunciation, at times was tough to follow if word ‘maximum’ was spelt ‘yum ya yax I yum yu yum’! Yet learning from them was fun, new lexicon, idioms and phrases and their usage were discovered, names of great books exchanged among us friends and consulting the ‘dictionary’ for difficult words was encouraged. I had once used the word ‘ecstasy’ in one of my school essays and our Sir was a bit surprised. He inquired where I had learnt this word from and asked ‘do you know what agony means?’ There was a knowledge sharing but no admonition for trying to explore… and were all on a discovery trail !

In one of our school elocutions, a speaker started his speech with a nursery rhyme and then went on to connect the threads therein. This became such a big hit that even the established speakers emulated him later. In College debates, funny repartees and punch lines were introduced and rebuttals gave birth to great witticisms, some on the lines of Oscar Wilde’s classic quote ‘nothing to declare except my genius’. Certainly those times were very different, quite shorn of state of art technology, Google and apps but what we got in return from our teachers and education was immeasurable. They taught us how to communicate & even add new languages to our armoury !