Manish Gupta - English Bites

On the face of it, all was going well for me at school. It was a five-minute walk away but we preferred to cycle the distance in under two. The school advertised itself as an English medium school, the only one to do so in my neighbourhood. Those were the 1980s and our parents were beginning to appreciate the role of proficiency distress in those being conversed with.

This school was located in the small, sleepy town of Rohtak in the north Indian state of Haryana. Our teachers had grown up studying in the vernacular and were likely to break into their mother tongue for topics that did not strictly fall within the boundaries of the course. It worked well for us as there was no real pressure to learn to converse in an alien tongue suited merely to the narrow world of academics.

Our English teacher, Mr Verma, was different though. He destroyed our fragile confidence with pleasure and lowered our self-esteem to levels where we couldnt even face ourselves in the mirror. Over time and after a lot of effort, we got better. We finally mastered the art of combing our hair without stealing even a glance at the looking glass!

Mr Verma would ask us to provide him with a list of our extracurricular interests and randomly call three students to make short speeches before the rest of the to the almighty and this continued till the selection of the three lambs for the day was done.

There were enough days in a year when all our prayers and promises came to nought, and I was pulled up right to the front. I would experience a sudden loss of all confidence, courage, and fluency and stammer away at Playing with my pet dog Rambo and my pet cat Lucy or How to win at Monopoly and marbles or Kitchen gardening techniques of grafting to multiply English rose plants and cacti and so on.

We tried to console ourselves that while the medium of instruction in our school was English, the medium of understanding, memorizing and responding was the vernacular. In other words, we thought in the vernacular and then translated our thoughts into English when asked to explain something in class. Naturally, this took longer than normal conversation wouldwithout the advantage of fluency, we were often left groping efforts at quick translations were exhausting, and I cant even begin to describe the relief of getting back into the comfort of the mother tongue during lunch breaks and small gaps between classes, when the next teacher was slightly late and we had a few moments of freedom.

Expectedly, my skills in all departments of the English languagespeech, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciationwere limited to the academic aspects of life. Good academic performance at school ensured that I could opt for the sciences stream in Class 11. By this time, my sister Ruchi, who was four years younger to me, had successfully weaned into the pursuit of academic excellence.

This led to a small conference at home attended by close family and friends. The mission was to decide which of the two teenagers would earn the privilege of staying longer at home, and which one would move to a hostel after Class 12. It was agreed that if there were one engineer and one doctor in the family, we could become more self-sufficient at repairing human bodies and home appliances, should they decide to malfunction at any time.

There was no engineering college in my city though it was full of professional institutions, especially medical colleges devoted to all treatment modalities such as allopathy, ayurveda, and homeopathy. Since I had managed to lower my average science score in my matriculation examination, thanks to poor marks in biology, I readily volunteered to explore the freedom of hostel life in an engineering college outside my beloved city.

And so it was, at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh, in the second phase of my academic career that I came across several long-suffering specimens of my species. We shared our sorrows, empathized deity of the English language. They spoke so fluently in this foreign tongue, at times using words and expressions alien to us, that we felt like children of a lesser god.

Some of these ladies and gentlemen were also rather enthused halls and laboratories of American universities. Others, who wanted to gather material riches and climb corporate ladders, dreamt of management courses in elite management institutes in India or abroad.

I certainly did not want to be left behind. Even before ragging season had ended, I started to gather information from seniors on management institutes in India and overseas. I sought out ways to make it to the Holy Grailany reputed institution in the US. I soon found out that the latter meant taking tests called GRE (for MS) or GMAT (for MBA). And clearing these tests depended, to a large extent, on ones proficiency in English vocabulary, reading comprehension and grammar.

On the advice of my seniors, I made a quick trip to the bookstore in Sector 11 market and purchased Barrons GRE, a popular guide book. Charged as I was, I began in right earnest to cram its innumerable word lists. Little did I realize that I had to start learning English from scratch. The more I crammed, the piteously less English I seemed to know!

How confusingly similar some words appeared to be! Such confusion between